


Plasticity

by Misfit_McCoward



Category: Naruto
Genre: Original Character(s), Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2019-07-13 11:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 55,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16017161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misfit_McCoward/pseuds/Misfit_McCoward
Summary: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes the immortal leader of a cult tries to summon the god of death and gets you instead. ‘Not dying’ just got a lot more complicated than ‘follow chemlab safety instructions.’ A tongue-in-cheek, Akatsuki-centric SI/OC.





	1. A girl has a bad day

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wanted to write a long-ish SI/OC, so here goes. I'm a little bit nervous because I wrote this a few years ago and decided a lot of it needed to be completely rewritten but... welp! You gotta post things eventually. 
> 
> This is meant to be fun and self-indulgent. There is no planned romance.

As far as Tori Mendoza could tell, she’d been rummaging around in someone’s else’s bathroom closet one moment, then a split second later found herself curled up in a wooden barrel. 

It took her a few moments to figure out she was in a barrel, of course. She wasn’t sure if her brain had registered the sudden darkness or that her knees had been folded up to her chin first, but either way she tried to stand and hit her head on the lid. She fell back and a liquid that pooled in the bottom of the barrel sloshed around her. 

It smelled foul, leaving a coppery aftertaste on the back of her tongue. 

Leaning back against the wall of the container, which was oddly wet, Tori blinked into darkness and tried numbly to comprehend  _ what the fuck was going on.  _

She’d been at a party. A dumb college party, celebrating ‘half-o-ween’ just before exams. She’d been dressed as a vampire and had been lugging around a Nalgene bottle full of fake blood. 

The bottle was tucked neatly between her feet, so at least that had travelled with her to… whatever this place was. She’d been upset about losing her plastic vampire teeth earlier, but that seemed silly now. 

She stretch out her hands and ran them along the walls of the container. The wood— or at least it was textured like unsanded wood, and slick with the foul-smelling liquid— was arranged in a cylinder around her. It was just wide enough to sit cross-legged with her admittedly short legs. 

She’d been— she’d  _ just  _ been trying to find toilet paper, not even thirty seconds ago. She’d waited in line for the bathroom, and when she finally got in, she’d zoomed in on the fact that the toilet paper roll was empty. Nalgene bottle in hand, she’d gone right for the closet door, and then… 

And then she was here. She managed to scramble into a squat, her knees banging against the walls, and pushed upwards on the lid. It didn’t budge. 

The key to this, Tori thought even as she hiccuped on the stale air, was to stay calm. She pushed harder. The lid did not give, and it was  _ dripping _ . 

The liquid, which was definitely not water, was slowly but steadily seeping in through the seal of the barrel or container or whatever contraption she was trapped in. The fluid dynamics were such that not only did it cling to and coat the walls, but also adhesive forces were strong enough it travelled across the top, pooled, and then dripped down onto to Tori’s face and hair. 

She discovered this running her fingers along the seal, desperately grasping for any crack or opening. Her hands were shaking. The nail of her left ring finger caught and ripped. She kept going. 

Was this a joke? Some kind of prank? She hadn’t known anyone at the party very well, but they’d seemed nice, and one of the hosts had invited her to a screening of  _ Carrie _ … 

She paused. The liquid seeping in smelled less rank and more like pennies. Her breath hitched. 

_ Oh god, _ she thought.  _ It’s blood.  _

It was up past her ankles. 

If she died like this, trapped in absolute darkness and drowning in blood, if she had to struggle against the immovable lid and rake at the wood until all her nails were gone and her own blood ran, if she  _ swallowed _ , if she inhaled the sticky blood into her _ lungs _ , if it went in her nose and eyes and ears–

Tori abruptly extended her legs, ducking her head so her forehead smacked the walls and her shoulders hit the lid. Putting everything she could into it, she pushed upwards. 

She meant to scream for help, to demand to be let out. It came out wordless and furious. 

It did nothing. 

“OUT!” she screamed, pushing until her legs cramped. “OUT! OUT!”

This was so stupid. If she was going to die a stupid, senseless death, she at least wanted to know who was responsible. 

She grabbed her Nalgene bottle and rammed it into the lid as hard as she could. Vibrations ran down her arm. 

“LET ME OUT,” she yelled. 

The blood was up to her waist. She needed to calm herself and think rationally. She stopped, panting, back still against the underside of the lid and legs still cramped from the weird position. Her entire body was trembling, but she forced herself to take a deep breath. 

The air tasted like stale blood and carbon dioxide. The surface of the blood brushed her chin. 

She screamed with a renewed panic, banging her fist and bottle against the walls. The blood rose to her mouth and in her panicked fury she did end up inhaling a mouthful, spluttering and coughing as she floundered to rearrange her body so her face was pressed against the roof, giving her a few more inches of air. 

The container filled, and Tori contemplated that the human soul better be real, because she was coming back and haunting the shit out of whoever sealed her in  _ whatever the fuck this was.  _

The lid opened. 

She burst from the surface, gasping for air and standing and grasping at the edges of the container for support. There was light, finally, but it was dim and she was seeing black spots. 

“Ho,” said a man’s voice, sounding incredibly pleased. 

Tori’s chest expanded and contracted, her body eagerly gulping in air. She blinked rapidly, clearing blood– and it was indeed red, sticky blood– and the spots from her eyes. 

She was in a wooded area. The trees were bigger and older than the ones marking the property line of the house she’d just been in. There was a man towering over her, all pale with moon-silver hair.

She staggered back. She didn’t want a man towering over her right now. 

Her back hit the edge of the barrel, which came to the bottom of her ribcage when standing. She didn’t want to be in the barrel any more. Turning, she got one knee over onto the rim, heaved forward, and then toppled out of the barrel and into the dirt. 

“Oh,” said the man, sounding incredibly disappointed.  

Tori rolled across the the packed dirt and managed to get to her knees and stand. Her limbs felt light and shaky. 

The man was towering over her again, but now he was frowning. He was conventionally handsome, with clear skin and dark red eyes. He was also, unfortunately, opening his mouth and snarling something rude and accusatory at her. 

“--and who the fuck are you?” he demanded, reaching out and grabbing her shirt with no concern for the slick blood. 

Tori stared dimly down at his hand, then squinted up at his face in disbelief. 

“Hidan,” she croaked. She’d meant for it to be a question, high-pitched at the end in her normal speaking voice, but she’d ruined her voice screaming and it came out as a flat statement of fact. 

The glare slipped from Hidan’s face and he eyed her calculatingly. 

This made no sense. Hidan was a cartoon character. There was no place near her college town like this. It was impossible and it didn’t make sense. This was just one of her weird lucid dreams, and she’d wake up soon wanting to vomit but otherwise in perfect health. 

“Right,” Tori decided, feeling vaguely like someone watching her and not like the one piloting her own body. She watched her herself untangle Hidan’s hand from her shirt and drop it. 

She was still wearing her stupid thrift-shop vampire costume, and her top was a black fishnet over a black camisole. That was a nice attention to detail, for an anxiety dream from hell. 

“You know my name,” Hidan said, sounding delighted and leaning in. 

“Yes, of course,” she said, and then backed up from him and walked around the other side of the barrel to get a better look at wherever she was. Her boots, now filled with blood, made squelching noises. 

The clearing was a perfect circle, all uniform packed dirt. There were other people scattered around, four or five kneeling at strategic positions in a weird pagan-looking symbol painted into the dirt with what was probably even more blood. 

There were also bodies, at least ten, all contained in their own weird pagan symbols. They were all contorted into unnatural shapes, faces caught up in horrific death masks. Trails of blood flowed from their open wounds, then spider webbed their way across the ground and to the wooden container. The blood trickled up the side of the container even as it overflowed and dripped blood back out. 

“Oh,” she said. “Hmm.”

This was pretty weird. Like, really weird, even for a dream. 

One of the living people stood and hurried over to her. 

“Oh vessel of Jashin-sama,” he crowed, “oh angel of death!”

“Um,” Tori said. 

She still had to pee. She’d forgotten it somewhere in the middle of panicking, but there it was again. She really hoped this wasn’t one of those dreams where she spent the whole time desperately looking for a bathroom. 

The man in front of her was rambling about laying waste to heathens and nonbelievers. Having grown up in the American south, violent religious rambling was par for the course for Tori, and she bobbed her head along as she tried to get her brain to piece together  _ where the fuck she was _ . 

Hidan stomped over, spun her around and jabbed her in the chest with his finger with enough force to cause her to stumble back half a step. It hurt. 

“Why the _ fuck _ do you look like that?” he demanded. 

Tori blinked up at him and he jabbed her again. He was big and aggressive and a little bit scary. 

“Oi, Haruaki,” Hidan said, turning to the other man. “You fucked up your summoning. There’s no way a shinigami–”

The air was hot and humid. Tori rubbed the spot on her chest where Hidan had poked her, right under her collar bone. It was sore. Her socks were wet and uncomfortable and disgusting liquids filled the gaps between her toes. Her hair was heavy and clumped as the blood dried and snagged on her fishnet shirt. Her fingertips smarted from where she’d ripped off nails. It all seemed very realistic.

“Are you,” Tori asked, her voice hoarse and deep. Hidan and the other man stopped arguing. “The one who brought me here?”

Hidan scowled, grabbed her buy the arm and dragged her up and towards him, so her toes dragged on the ground. His face filled her vision.

“This fucker made me waste a entire week setting this up to get you,” Hidan said, and his breath was hot on her face. “So you’d better tell me you can reap the whole damn village, or we’re going to find out what happens when you kill a shinigami.”

Tori was beginning to suspect she was not in a dream. She was also beginning to suspect she was going to die. 

She didn’t  _ want  _ to die. 

“Alright,” she said slowly. Then because he’d cheered up when she’d said it before, she added, “Hidan.”

Hidan stared at her, eyes wild, for several seconds. She held eye contact, doing her best to ignore the rising panic in the back of her brain. She had excellent facial control and was good at keeping a straight face in stressful situations– she could do this much, at least. Hidan finally dropped her. 

“Jashin wouldn’t put a girl in a coffin without a reason,” he reasoned. He sounded like he was convincing himself as much as he was convincing his comrade. “Even if she looks like a drowned rat.”

_ Rude _ .

Tori opened her mouth to– to play along, she guessed, and tell him in a mystic otherworldly being voice not to mock a shinigami. Instead she said: 

“Then find me a bath.”

She was starting to smell, and she had to pee. 

\--

There was a small lake nearby, which Hidan was very happy to hurl her into, clothes and all. She did her best to rinse her hair out. The sun had started to set, and she hoped she looked like a proper death god as she ran her fingers through her dark hair in the twilight. She had very long, thick hair– it might look very dramatic. 

It probably didn’t. She peed her pants while standing waist-deep in the water. She didn’t think shinigami got bathroom breaks, so she might as well do it now. 

Hidan sat on the edge of the lake and glared at her the whole time. Some of the other Jashinists had crowded off to the side and were muttering to each and looking at her doubtfully. 

A bunch of murderers had unknowingly watched her pee in a lake. Her mind had gone blank. She couldn’t handle this. She couldn’t even get the blood out of her clothes and hair properly. 

She very much wanted to curl up somewhere and cry. She’d have to save that for later, though, when she was free or, more likely,  _ dead.  _

Tori considered just swimming to the other side of the lake and running away. There was literally no way she could have prepared for or anticipated this situation, and she was at an absolute loss for what she could do to get out of it. 

They wanted her to ‘reap the village.’ What did that mean? 

Swimming away wouldn’t work, anyway. Hidan could literally walk on water. Even if she did get away– which she couldn’t physically do because she wasn’t a cartoon ninja– where would she go? They were in the middle of the woods at night. 

She’d have to get to this village, then. She didn’t know where it was, so she’d go along with this… shinigami… Jashinist summoning… thing until they got there. Then she’d figure out a way to get away. 

She briefly thought about how she still had no plan for after that, and momentarily considered that they seemed to be going to the village with the aim of murdering everyone, but… well, if she thought about that too long she was going to lose hope and shut down. The short term goal of getting to the village was much easier to focus on. 

Okay. Yes. She could do this. She waded back to the edge of the lake. 

“Hidan,” she said, because he liked that she knew his name. He leaned back on his arms, cocked his head, and gave her a disparaging look. 

If she was going to get him to take her safely to the village, she needed to convince him she was a true otherworldly entity. Which, now that she thought about it, she technically was. How did she make him believe that?

She eyed him. She tilted her head back to look down her nose at him– she was a god, wasn’t she? Isn’t that how they’d expect her behave? 

The little huddle of Jashinists kept whispering, giving her odd flashbacks to middle school clique drama. She supposed the effect of looking down on them was ruined by her being covered in a thin film of diluted blood and lake scum… and also being five feet tall and ankle-deep in muddy water. 

She stepped up onto shore. Her movements were shaky and less graceful than she’d like, and Hidan raised his eyebrows at her. The bank of the lake was grassy, and he had his legs sprawled out in front of him, his Akatsuki cloak unbuttoned and pooling around him. 

“Where’s Kakuzu?” she asked. 

Hidan leaned further back on his hands and crossed his legs at the ankles. “Who the fuck is Kakuzu?”

For less than a second, Tori felt a wave of hot panic. Had he not met Kakuzu yet? No, he was wearing the cloak– he had to have. 

Tori twitched, then very purposefully curled her lip into a sneer. “Your  _ partner, _ Hidan. Don’t play games with me.”

“Ah,” said Hidan, then got to his feet. He grinned at her. “Yeah, I guess you’re legit.”

Then he hit her approvingly on the shoulder hard enough to nearly knock her over. He didn’t seem to notice though, as he started yelling at his comrades to start moving out. Tori watched them carefully. They followed Hidan’s commands, but they didn’t seem particularly happy about it. 

Hmm. 

One of the Jashinists approached her. There were five others besides Hidan, including the one that had greeted her as an angel of death. They all wore the same pendant with the symbol of Jashin. 

“You dropped this,” the Jashinist said, holding out her Nalgene bottle. 

“Oh,” she said, and took it. Her first instinct was to thank the man. Did shinigami thank people? 

It didn’t matter; he turned away from her immediately. 

\--

What Tori managed to learn from their conversation, as they marched through the woods towards the village, was this: 

Haruaki– the man who’d announced her as a servant of Jashin– was some type of fuuinjutsu user who’d set up the… sealing array or whatever it was to summon her. He’d also gathered fifteen other Jashinists. 

Ten of them had ended up sacrifices. Apparently not every follower of Jashin got up again after death. 

In fact, she’d be willing to bet Hidan was the only one here who could. Everyone treated him with fear and respect and as the de facto leader, even though Haruaki had done most of the organizing and it was clear no one actually liked Hidan. 

Hidan didn’t seem to like anyone else either, and at one point snapped at Haruaki and called him a “snivelling dog begging at Jashin-sama’s feet.” Haruaki had just squared his shoulders and taken it. 

So… there was that. 

Hidan and Haruaki must have a history, though, since they both wore headbands from Yugakure. Yugakure, incidentally, was also the village they were traveling to ‘reap.’

There was a lot to unpack there. 

At least she didn’t have to pee anymore. 

Hidan took the lead of their little party, putting several yards between himself and the rest, and Tori scrambled to keep up with him. He walked faster than she liked, but he was obviously more accepting of the idea she might be a god than the others. 

They were following a poorly maintained path. It was wide enough for a car to pass, so Tori assumed it was once used for carts or herding mules or whatever they used for transport in this world. Now it was covered in tree roots and upturned rocks and weird holes. There had been a faded sign nailed to a tree a while back that claimed that Yugakure was four hours away. Tori liked hiking, and the walk wasn’t particularly strenuous, so under normal circumstances a four hour walk across relatively flat terrain would be fairly easy. ‘Normal circumstances’ being the key phrase there, of course. Trying to keep up with Hidan– who was at least a foot taller than her, and infinitely more in shape– was not easy, especially when it was dark and they were marching to the light of fancy ninja glowsticks. 

No one had given her a glowstick. She had to work to keep at Hidan’s side to even be able to see, which was easier said than done. She was quickly reduced to a sweaty, winded mess. It didn’t help that the knee-high boots she was wearing were obviously designed for fashion statements and not hiking. 

When she inevitably tripped and fell, Haruaki leaned over her and suggested that they had, perhaps, made a mistake with the summoning. 

He didn’t even offer to help her up. Rude. 

She supposed she did look ridiculous; she was still damp from her dip in the lake, and her clothes were uncomfortably heavy in the humid evening. At least she had been dressed like a gothic edgelord instead of in a cute sundress when she’d emerged from a blood-filled coffin. She looked at least slightly more the part. 

She sat up. Hidan was yelling profanities at Haruaki. “Did you heed the call of Jashin or not–”

She stood up, grabbing her Nalgene bottle and unscrewing the lid. Her fake blood was mostly chocolate syrup, with some corn starch for viscosity and red food dye for color. She unscrewed the top and took a sizeable gulp, since she was hungry and could use an energy boost. Some of it dribbled down her chin and she wiped it away. 

“You know,” she said, interrupting their argument because she would really rather not have this Haruaki person convince Hidan she was a fake. “You only get as much out of a summoning as you put in. You think ten sacrifices were enough to get a shinigami at full power?”

She crossed her arms and popped a hip in a show of false confidence and waited expectantly. 

“I fucking told you,” Hidan said finally, turning back to Haruaki. “Jashin-sama wouldn’t let  _ me _ down.”

That wording, Tori thought, was telling, and she decided to gamble. “Ten might have been enough,” she said, “if you’d gotten proper followers. I don’t even know who you are.”

She gestured vaguely at all the people who weren’t Hidan. Haruaki looked offended. Hidan’s eyes lit up. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that makes sense. So what  _ can _ you do, chibigami?”

Tori opened her mouth only to realize she had not thought that far through her charade. “I don’t appreciate your nickname,” she said instead. 

“What can you _ do _ ?” Haruaki growled out. 

Tori glanced at him, trying to be as dismissive as possible, and then took another long drink from her Nalgene. 

Having wasted plenty of time, she still hadn’t thought of a good lie and said the first thing that came to mind. “I can see people’s fates.” 

“Hidan-san,” Haruaki practically whined, but Hidan ignored him, crossing his arms over his chest. 

“Oh yeah?” he said. “How’s that gonna help us, chibigami?”

She cocked her head in a play for seeming cool. It reminded her that her hair had formed into one giant tangle. “I suppose I could cut their fates as well.”

After she said it, she realized any rational person would question that meant and she didn’t have an answer. 

Hidan, thankfully, was not a particularly rational person and nodded seriously. Haruaki, however, looked like he’d just swallowed a lemon. 

“What does that _ mean? _ ” he asked. “You can’t honestly expect us to believe you’re some kind of--”

“Shut  _ up _ ,” Hidan yelled. He grabbed his scythe off his back, and before Tori or Haruaki could properly register was happening, two of the scythe’s blades were embedded in Haruaki’s chest. Blood splattered everywhere and Haruaki let out a sad sort of wheeze. 

Hidan shook the blade a couple times, then dislodged Haruaki’s body with his foot. 

“Don’t you dare,” Hidan growled, setting his foot right over Haruaki’s wounds and pressing down, “question the will of Jashin-sama. We asked Jashin-sama for a messenger of death, and so that’s what we got.”

Haruaki, who was quite clearly dead, did not answer. 

Hidan turned his fury on the rest of the Jashinists. “Anyone else got a problem with chibigami?”

Tori certainly had a problem with what was going on, and she was glad Hidan was distracted enough not to notice her working her way through several breathing exercises. She could have her panic attack when she had escaped, she reminded herself.  _ She could have her panic attack when she escaped. _

She didn’t catch what the replies were, but Hidan eventually turned to keep going down the path, and one of the Jashinists knelt in front of her and offered to carry her the rest of the way. 

\--

Riding on the back of a ninja made the rest of the of the trip take less than an hour. 

They stopped just short of the tree line. Yugakure– a former ninja village with no currently active shinobi and no ninja academy– had dismantled most of their protective walls, leaving a few observational turrets and a symbolic wooden archway at its entrance. The writing above the arch declared Yugakure’s new name for itself:  _ The Village That Has Forgotten War _ .

The violence-loving Jashinists hated Yugakure and would wipe it off the earth for this sin.

Or… something like that. Hidan went on a very long tirade about it in what Tori guessed was supposed to be some sort of pep talk. She ignored it mostly in favor of chanting to herself to  _ stay cool stay calm stay cool stay calm. _

“Well?” Hidan finally asked, looking at her expectantly. “Do your thing.”

Tori blinked at him. Her ears were ringing and she could barely remember what her ‘thing’ was. “I’ll go in alone first,” she heard herself say. “You’ll know when to follow.”

Then, feeling incredibly lightheaded, she walked out of the trees and into Yugakure. 

Yugakure was pretty, she thought. It was all narrow cobblestone streets lined with lights. The buildings were cramped but elegant with dark, slanting roofs. People decorated their windows with potted plants. 

The narrow streets were the part she liked most. She ducked into an alley, squatted down behind a dumpster, and let herself cry. 

Eventually she heard a rustling over her, and looked up to see a woman rummaging in the dumpster. She’d balanced herself on the edge and was poking through it with a crowbar. Tori watched for a few minutes before the women seemed to notice her. 

“You okay?” the woman asked. 

“Yes,” Tori answered automatically, even though it was embarrassingly obvious she was overwhelmingly not okay. 

“Here,” the woman said, and tossed down a bundle of newspapers she’d fished out of the dumpster. “That’ll cheer you up.”

The headline read  _ SEVENTEEN MORE CONFIRMED DEATHS FROM DEAD WATER FEVER! WILL HOT WATER COUNTRY BE NEXT? _ so she wasn’t exactly sure how that was supposed to cheer her up. 

She read the article, anyway. It was calming– she was a biology major and liked learning about new diseases and the spread. Then she read the rest of the newspaper. The woman filled the knapsack on her back with some items from the dumpster and dropped two magazines at Tori’s feet. 

“Could be worse, you know,” the woman said, toeing the headline of one of the magazines. “In Water Country they’ve got people dying all over.”

Tori nodded dully. She didn’t really care that much about an epidemic in another country right now, but it had been an interesting read. 

“Thanks,” Tori said. “Have a good evening.”

The woman shrugged and bustled off. 

Tori wrapped the strap of her Nalgene around her wrist and gathered the magazines and one of the newspapers in her arms. These were the only things she had in this world, and she felt compelled to keep them. 

She wandered out of the alley. There were more people walking around the village than she would expect for this time of night, and they were mostly heading in the same direction. She decided to follow. 

No one paid her any mind. She was filthy and gross looking, yes, but she was also very good at shrinking her presence, hunching over her new reading material. It probably helped that Yugakure seemed to have a sizeable homeless population– including the woman who’d helped her– and its residents were practiced at ignoring them. 

She followed the flow of people to a huge open square, which was lit up and lined with various vendors in wooden stalls. Most of them sold food, but there were some crafts and games. Tori wondered if this was always here or part of some special event. 

The smell of something savory and fried hit her nose. Her stomach groaned. Without even thinking it through, she let her legs wobble as she approached a stall, willing her entire presence to screaming misery.

It wasn’t hard– she  _ was _ a miserable mess. 

“Um, excuse me,” she said to the man throwing onions and mushrooms onto the grill between them. She tried not to blink so the smoke would get in her eyes and make her tear up again. “I was robbed on my way into town and–” she hiccupped, let her face tremble like she was on the verge of tears.

“Move along,” the man snapped. “If you don’t have any money, you can starve for all I care.”

She turned to the woman at the stall next to him, tears welling in her eyes, but the woman avoided eye contact. So did the man on the other side. A couple holding hands pointedly ignored her as they discussed their food order.

“Oh for crying out loud,” said a voice behind her. She turned to see a takoyaki salesman wavering her towards his booth. She approached timidly.

“I swear, people can be disgusting,” he said, ladling sauce onto a double-helping of the takoyaki for her.

“Thank you so much,” Tori said, looking for all the world like she was about to cry. The man smiled kindly at her.

Tori took her food to a bench on the opposite end of the square, feeling smug at her deception. She set her possessions down next to her and happily licked a fleck of sauce from her fingers. After an entire day of feeling on-edge with Hidan, this particular charade had been a breeze.

It was calming to have warm food in front of her, and a tiny bit of optimism crept in her mind. Yes. She could definitely hide somewhere and wait out Hidan’s massacre, or sneak out and avoid it all together, or–

A family of four walked by, laughing as they ate little barbecued squids off of sticks. One parent affectionately ruffled the hair of the younger child. 

The food turned to chalk in Tori’s mouth. She put the paper container down and wanted to vomit. These people were going to die. In all her posturing in front of Hidan– flippantly talking about human sacrifices– she’d been thinking of the people of this world as fictional background characters. They weren’t.

This world was real and had real problems. She didn’t want to be one of them. 

She felt panic and tears well in her again, which was not going to help her. To distract herself, she grabbed one of the magazines and flipped through it. There was gossip on celebrities she didn’t recognize and an article on the possible spread of this dead water fever into other countries. 

It was a hemorrhagic disease that turned your organs to mush and made you bleed out your nose and ears. That woman had been right. This was a much worse fate than being sacrificed to the god of suffering. 

Tori tried to focus on the article over the overwhelming panic in the back of her mind. Calm down, she commanded herself. Think. 

Dead water fever got its name from the fact that it thrived in places with plenty of warm, still water, which Hot Water Country happened to be filled with. There was a lot of fear-mongering in the articles she read– a lot of travelers moved through Hot Water Country, and people were terrified of those travelers bringing in the deadly disease. 

Or at least that’s what these articles claimed. Tori wanted more facts than ominous warnings. Was the fever spreading a real threat? Did local authorities have plans in place in case an infection broke out? Was it really as deadly as the gossip magazine claimed? What was the exact mechanism of the disease? How was it being transmitted– mosquitoes? Was anyone working on a vaccine or treatment?

She got up, gathered her things, and went to go find someone who might know. 

\--

Tori found the woman who’d given her the magazines, yelling at man as he poked through another dumpster.

“What do you know about this?” Tori asked, holding up the newspaper with the fever on the front page.

Her reasoning in approaching the woman had been that the woman was both open to talking to her and also presumably read the local news. Any conversation would be a great distraction from having a panic attack about Hidan.

The woman snorted and answered, “I know if it shows up here I’m getting  _ out _ .” Then she eyed the leftover takoyaki in Tori’s other hand. “You gonna eat that?”

In that moment, Tori had a monumentally stupid idea.

She handed the woman her food and the man jumped down from the dumpster to join them.

It was a stupid idea, but Tori was probably going to die anyway. The Jashinists were no doubt watching the village, so she couldn’t leave. Eventually Hidan would get bored and barge in, signal from her or not. She might as well die making a dramatic stand.

\--

A little past eleven, the party in town was still going strong, but the hospital was quiet. There was a single receptionist at the front desk of the hospital when Tori wandered in.

Tori stood in the center of the room, swayed, and then collapsed.

Tori heard the scrape of the receptionist’s chair and then her hurried footsteps over. The noise stopped, there was a long pause, and the receptionist said, “Oh  _ shit. _ ”

She hurried off. Tori continued to lay on the floor, as still as possible. She’d filled her ears and nose and mouth with fake blood from her Nalgene. Somewhere else in the village, the two homeless people she’d shared her dinner with would be doing something similar.

Her immensely stupid idea was this: if there was an outbreak of a fatal disease, people would flee. If people fled, Hidan couldn’t kill all of them.

There were a lot of ways this could go wrong and not a lot of ways it could actually work. She refused to think about that though, and instead focused on looking as ill as possible as medical personnel showed up to talk about what to do with her.

“We can’t just leave her here,” one of the medics was saying. They were all standing as far away from her as possible.

“Well we can’t treat her here either,” another voice snapped back. “We’re not equipped for quarantine. We don’t even have the proper equipment to handle something like this since the post-war decommission.”

“Are we sure it’s dead water fever?” another voice asked.

Tori keep her body completely limp and prayed none of them actually examined her. She had absolutely no idea how to fake a fever, or the signature rash, and she was certain a trained medical professional would be able to tell the blood was actually chocolate syrup up close.

“She’s bleeding from every visible orifice,” the first voice said. “I think it’s safest to assume she does have it until we’ve got a safe way to diagnose and treat her.”

“And how are we supposed to do that? The closest place with the proper equipment is Oto, and  _ they’re _ not likely to help us.”

“Maybe they will,” a fourth voice said idly. “Their head medic is pretty shady, maybe he’ll want to study her.”

A snort of derision.

They started arguing about whether or not to approach her again. She had not seen any of their faces, but Tori was fairly certain they were all quite young, probably not much older than she herself. The homeless woman had told her most of the senior staff in the hospital had been shinobi, and when the village started dismantling their military, most of them had left, leaving the hospital understaffed by less experienced healers.

Both the homeless woman and man were shinobi who’d been left jobless by the decommission. They knew all about it.

Suddenly, there was screaming from outside. The sound of running filled the hospital.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” one of the medics yelled. “ _ Another _ one?”

The woman had loved the idea of vomiting fake blood in public and causing chaos in the village. So had the man. 

There were shouts for evacuations. Slamming doors– commands to lock her in the reception area. The hospital filled with the sounds of chaos. But the reception area was left an oasis of calm.

Tori cracked an eyelid. She was alone. Cautiously, she stood. There were two sets of glass doors leading outside, and the outer set was barricaded from the outside with a dumpster. She watched house lights flicker on and people run by. No one looked at her. She could hear movement form above– upper floors of the hospital evacuating patients through other exits.

Her plan had worked. People were evacuating, and in the chaos she could hopefully sneak away from the village without anyone noticing.

At least, she thought it had worked, until she realized she was locked in the hospital.


	2. A girl somehow has a WORSE day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which more canon characters are mean to our heroine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I wrote parts of this years ago, I ended up stuck with a very weird naming convention. Basically: country names were left in English but village names are in Japanese. This was presumably to avoid saying things like "Hot Water Village, in Hot Water Country–" even though _they mean they same thing, past self, why are you like this–_

Hidan had intended to attack the village at dawn, which would give him enough time to slaughter its population and ritualistically sacrifice its peace-loving leaders before Kakuzu showed up at noon.

(Hidan’s companions thought this was a bit of a time crunch, but no one said anything.)

After sending his little death god off to do… whatever the fuck she was going to do, Hidan sat down against a tree to get some much-deserved pre-murdering-spree sleep. When he was woken up hours before dawn, he was understandably pissed.

“What the fuck?” he grumbled at his nervous-looking follower. “You better have a damn good reason for waking me up.”

“Hidan-sama.” The man he’d sent to watch the tiny death god was back. “The village is rioting.”

Hidan shot to his feet, grabbing his scythe. “What do you mean,  _ rioting _ ?”

“They’re…” the man hesitated. “Some of the former shinobi attempted to initiate a civilian lock-down, but a lot of people have taken to the street instead.”

“Why’d they do that?” Hidan demanded.

“There was an outbreak of dead water fever.” The man made a face. Hidan did not care enough to wonder if the face was disbelief or fear or disgust. 

Dead water fever. Highly contagious. Highly deadly. Highly likely to cause a frenzied panic.

Hidan’s followers looked nervous. Hidan, instead, threw his head back and laughed.

\--

Hidan did not fear disease, the same way he did not fear being struck down in battle. He led the other Jashinists to the village, scaling a watch tower and throwing its single sentinel out the window after beheading him. From there he watched his former home light up with fire and screams.

He was ecstatic.

One of the Jashinists appeared, having returned from reconnaissance.

“Apparently a band of foreigners are infected, about ten in total. A handful of locals have come down with the disease. There’s fear it’s gotten into the water supply.”

Hidan cackled. Summoning the tiny shinigami was the best idea he’d had in a while. It did not occur to him that wild rumors spread during a public panic might, in fact, be wild rumors. 

Hidan grinned as he ordered his followers to surround the village and kill anyone they found trying to escape. He’d enter the city alone, relishing the idea of destroying the whole thing with his own two hands. Or, more technically, his two hands plus Jashin-sama’s uncountable… whatever Jashin-sama had.  

He landed in the main street. One of the fine, rich houses that lined it was on fire– possibly arson, but possibly just an accident with one of the torches the older houses used for illumination. Either way, it pleased Hidan.

A pair of young boys ran by him, slowly down briefly to stare at him in wonder. He grinned back at them. They were each holding armfuls of expensive goods– undoubtedly stolen. Hidan would let them go for now. He wanted as much chaos as possible.

A woman screamed and his grip on his scythe tightened.  _ That _ was the type of victim he was looking for right now.

\--

Tori threw a chair at the glass doors. It bounced back and she yelped as she leapt out of the way.

All the doors were locked. She could go down the back hallway a little bit, but eventually there was a heavy double door chained closed from the other side. Other than that, there was the hallway to the ER and a hallway that led to radiation. Both ended with locked doors. 

She’d tried breaking the windows, but that had failed. She’d thought about climbing through the vents, but the openings were too small to fit through. She’d thoroughly searched the room twice over for some tool to break open the locks, but no dice. Hours later, she was back to breaking windows, but that was still failing.

What was this, ninja-proof glass? Was that a thing?

On top of all that, as far as she could tell, the people running around outside and screaming were  _ not _ evacuating the village like she’d hoped.

She righted the chair and sat down.

“How are we going to get out of this one, Scoob?” she mumbled, then wondered if crying again would make her feel better. 

_ Useless _ , a voice hissed in the back of her mind. 

She sighed and stared up at the ceiling. Crying would definitely not help. Maybe she should try praying. If the Naruto World was real (and she was going to need some non-chaotic downtime to process  _ that _ properly), maybe its gods were real too.

“Dear Jashin,” she said to the ceiling. “I have created this madness in your honor. Please help.”

Nothing happened. Not that she’d expected as much.

She frowned at the ceiling. It was the same foamy tiles her high school had had. The kind that weren’t fixed in place, but rather laying against a metal frame. She’d watched various teachers and staff move them while changing light bulbs. Hell, she’d watched students climb on their desks and hide stuff in the ceiling with those tiles.

She guessed Jashin was on her side after all.

Being as short as she was, she had to balance a chair on top of the receptionist’s desk to reach the high ceiling. It was easy enough to move a tile aside and open a hole into the ceiling, but the gap was still above her head and she was absolutely lacking the upper body strength to pull herself up.

Tori stood on the desk and surveyed the room. As her eyes landed on a stool, a large explosion rocked the building. Tori squawked and nearly fell off the desk. More screams than ever started up outside.

A new wave of adrenaline coursed through Tori as she jumped off the desk and grabbed the stool. She hauled it back onto the desk and dropped it onto the chair, but the seat was only wide enough for two of the stool’s three legs.

Tori turned the stool around and around, desperately trying to make it fit. There was crashing from inside the hospital– right on the other side of the doors to the ER. Tori climbed onto the unstable stool anyway.

“Your blood will be the first to quench Jashin-sama’s thirst, Old Man!” a voice was yelling as Tori practically jumped into the ceiling.

Loud bangs came from below as Tori army crawled across the ceiling tiles. A man was pleading for his life. She didn’t know where she was going or what she was doing. All the panic she’d been holding back was coming out, her whole body shaking violently and her vision blurring.

And then, the ceiling fell out from under her.

\--

Hidan had found the first of the village leaders he wanted to sacrifice: the head of hospital, Hiroshi Yukai. The old man was trying to unlock a back-entrance to the hospital when Hidan descended upon him, wrapping one blood-stained hand around his neck.

“ _ You _ ,” the old man croaked. A kunai appeared from under the old man’s cloak and Hidan jumped away, but it was already too late. Hidan licked the old man’s blood from his fingernail.

“I’m going to enjoy sacrificing you, Old Man,” Hidan practically purred as his skin turned to obsidian. HIroshi Yukai’s eyes widened in horror.

“N–no, please,” the man begged, shrinking away. “There are still people inside– I need to help them–”

Hidan rolled his eyes. “You’ve gone senile, Old Man,” he said. “Peace isn’t a good look for you.”

Yukai slammed his hand against the brick wall of the hospital and a seal spread out from his fingertips. He leapt back as it exploded.

Hidan smirked and took the explosion head-on. The old man made a strange sort of gasping noise and fell to his knees, various cuts and bruises blooming across his body.

“Nice try, Old Man,” Hidan sneered, grabbing the man’s neck again. He dragged him through the hole into the hospital, intent on finding a nice clear area to perform the sacrificial rites.

Kicking through a few locked doors, Hidan finally arrived in the main entrance way. Perfect.

There was a weird rustling from above– rats? The people in upper floors who had been left behind? Hidan didn’t care. He dropped the old man to the floor and began his pre-sacrifice prayers. 

The ceiling collapsed. Something fell on his sacrifice. The old man’s head slammed into the ground and Hidan collapsed. A girl’s voice moaned in pain.

“What the FUCK,” Hidan yelled, dragging himself back to his feet and blinking away the head injury he’d just experienced through his sacrifice. He lurched forward and grabbed the tiny death god, pulling her up and shaking her. “Why the fuck are you–”

He stopped mid-sentence, dropping the shinigami. His furious eyes strayed from the girl’s dazed form to the old man’s perfectly still one.

The man, already old and weakened by battle, had just had his head slammed into the hard floor.

The man was dead.

Hidan’s sacrifice was gone.

“You,” Hidan rounded on the girl, eyes filled with rage. “You stole my sacrifice!”

The girl made a pathetic squeaking noise and tried to crawl behind the receptionist’s desk. Hidan grabbed her leg and threw her onto the old man’s corpse.

“You’ll just have to take his place!” Hidan roared.

“B–b–but,” the girl stuttered. “I did what you asked! I cut his fate!”

She looked down at the dead man, suddenly horrified. She had been partially leaning on his chest, and she ripped herself away from him as if pulling herself from boiling water.

Hidan watched as her eyes widened. She didn’t look like a god of death now. Not that she had before, but… despite a few lapses, before she’d at least given off the  _ feeling _ of being a shinigami. Now was she just a frightened little girl.

“You’re a liar,” he accused, deadly calm. 

She looked absolutely, mortally terrified for just a few seconds. Then she scowled at him and snapped, “I did what you asked! Jashin-sama doesn’t like to be kept waiting, you know.”

That… seemed plausible. Jashin-sama had intervened in Hidan’s rituals before, when he hadn’t quite perfected them yet. 

She _ had _ mysteriously appeared as a result of the summoning ritual. Normal people didn’t just  _ show up _ after a summoning, did they?

The little woman got to her feet. She put her hands on her hips, shaking with holy rage. 

Or… extremely human fear. 

Hidan wasn’t sure. He grabbed her by her gross hair and dragged her out of the hospital with him. 

\--

When Kakuzu arrived in Yugakure at precisely noon, it had been massacred, just as Hidan had promised.

Bodies and dying fires littered the streets. Kakuzu could still feel quite a few chakra signatures in hiding, but he hadn’t really expected Hidan to kill the  _ entire _ village. The man wasn’t efficient enough for that.

When he found Hidan in the main square, he was half-way through a double sacrifice.

“Only an hour left,” one of Hidan’s followers assured him. Kakuzu considered ripping the man’s arm off out of annoyance. But Kakuzu had just made quite a bit of money off the bounty he’d been turning in, so he was in a good mood.

“Hidan-sama is doing a double sacrifice of the last two leaders out of consideration for you, Kakuzu-sama,” the man was saving. “To save time.”

Kakuzu ignored him, surveying the main square. Most of the vendors’ stalls had been smashed, but Hidan’s other followers were eating leftover food from one of the ones that had been spared. At their feet, under the barstools set up at the stand, a civilian girl was lying bound by her hands and feet.

Kakuzu blinked. That was new.

He didn’t ask about the girl, preferring to ignore Hidan’s obnoxious followers. When Hidan finished his ritual, the followers bowed to him and disappeared with the bodies of the village leaders.

They left the girl exactly where she was.

“You took too long,” Kakuzu growled. “And you didn’t even finish off the entire village.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Hidan snapped back. “I got sidetracked. That reminds me…”

He glowered and stomped over the girl, dragging her out from under the stall by her hair. Kakuzu followed him boredly.

“Are you going to sacrifice her too?” he asked. “You said you’d be done by noon.”

“I just want your fucking opinion on something, asshole,” Hidan answered, throwing the girl to the ground between them. “Does this bitch look like a shinigami to you?”

The girl was shaking, her long hair matted with dirt and sweat and something that looked like dried blood. The rest of her was caked in dirt and more of the unknown dried liquid.

“Is this a joke?” Kakuzu asked.

“I-if I’m not a sh-shinigami…” the girl struggled to pull herself up and failed. Her voice was quivering pathetically. “…then how did you summon me?”

Hidan stared down at her, stumped. Kakuzu raised an eyebrow. “Your summoning ritual you were so proud of produced  _ this _ ?”

“Shut up!”

“If I’m not a shinigami,” the girl continued, her voice evening out. “Then why do I know your names, Hidan? Kakuzu?”

She was radiating anger now. Kakuzu was not impressed.

“Well?” Hidan asked, waving exasperatedly at her. “There wasn’t anyone in the coffin, and then we did the ritual, and then she came out. So what the fuck is she?”

Kakuzu kneeled down, eyeing the girl with his strange green and red eyes. She held his gaze, scowling.

“You summoned this one?”

“Yeah,” Hidan answered, kicking at the ground. “Three day ritual, ten soul sacrifice, right from the book of Jashin itself!”

Kakuzu reached forward and gripped the girl’s hair at the roots to angle her face up at him. She made a gurgling noise at him that might have been meant to be intimidating or might have been out of fear.

Hidan seemed genuinely annoyed. The girl was doing the thing again where she was trying to radiate power she did not have, angling her chin at Kakuzu to glare down her nose at him.

Kakuzu dropped her and stood again.

“You’ve been had,” he told Hidan simply.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Hidan yelled. A flash of terror flickered across the girl’s face before she tried to hide it with outrage. “She came out of a  _ coffin _ , covering  _ blood _ –”

“I am _ not _ of this world–”

Kakuzu raised his voice over both their protests. “I don’t know how she was summoned, but she’s obviously nothing more than a normal mortal woman.” He did a one-over of her prone form. “She’s not even a ninja, just a mildly talented actress.”

The girl’s face did something like a terrified pout and Hidan yelled, “WHAT!”

Kakuzu turned to Hidan. “I suggest you get rid of her before this story gets out. It would be bad for your reputation.” And by extension, Kakuzu’s reputation.

“With fucking pleasure.” Hidan raised his scythe.

“W– w– wait!” The girl yelled, pathetically trying to wiggle away from them. “I’m– I’m not a shinigami, but I really can see your fates!”

Kakuzu rolled his eyes and Hidan snorted. “Fool me once, Chibigami.”

If Tori weren’t terrified, she’d comment on the uninspired insult. Instead, she stuttered out more terrified pleas. “I really am from another world,” she blabbered. “You think your ritual would summon a normal girl?”

Hidan paused, seeming to think this over. Then he shrugged. “Nope,” he said, “too pissed not to kill you.”

The girl was wide-eyed and starting to tear up now. Her desperate gaze moved from Hidan to Kakuzu, her mind reeling.

“I’m more valuable alive, you know!” she yelped. “You– you could sell me. Sound’s not far, I bet Orochimaru and Kabuto would love to study a girl from another world. Or– or– or technically I’m patient zero for dead water fever– and–”

She started babbling on about how should could be sold for medical research or into slavery or how she could sell her eggs and plasma for him (whatever  _ that _ meant), but she had set Kakuzu to thinking.

“Hidan,” Kakuzu said, placing a hand on his partner’s shoulder as the man advanced. “Wait.”

“You just told me to kill her,” Hidan whined.

“If she really is a summon, I she might truly be from another world,” Kakuzu said. “And she’s correct that a being from another world might be valuable.”

Hidan groaned. “What, you want to take her to Leader-sama?”

“I don’t think Leader-sama would properly monetize this situation…”

The two started arguing. Hidan pointed out that just because she  _ thought _ she was from another world didn’t mean she was. Kakuzu reasoned that summoning jutsu were designed to pull summons, such as animals or gods, from their own worlds, so it was likely Hidan’s summon had just pulled someone from the wrong world. Hidan pointed out there was absolutely no foundation for that argument other than Kakuzu being a greedy piece of shit who wanted it to be true. Kakuzu said it didn’t matter  _ where _ she was from as long as Orochimaru  _ thought _ she was from another world.

“You seriously want to do exactly what she said?” Hidan asked. “You want to sell her to fucking  _ Orochimaru _ ?”

Kakuzu just stared back at him, unbudged. “It was a good idea,” he said plainly.

Tori, who had been thinking about this suggestion as they argued, piped up. “Um, actually, Mr. Kakuzu sir, I changed my mind… I’d rather just sell my eggs. Sir.”

She smiled winningly up at him.

“You’re disgusting,” Hidan said.

\--

The trip through Hot Water country turned out to be rather uneventful. Kakuzu threw her over his shoulder and headed off into the forest, travelling quickly through the trees ninja-style. At first Tori was not sure if she should try to be optimistic and enjoy whizzing through the trees, or be terrified that she was being touted off to be sold to a sadistic scientist, but in the end she just wound up being extremely annoyed by Hidan’s constant death threats.

Hidan followed along behind Kakuzu, angrily explaining to her exactly what he was going to do to her if selling her failed.

“You know,” she said after a few hours of non-stop threats, “This actually stops being scary and gets  _ boring _ after a while.”

“You won’t be bored when I rip out your spine–” He went into another tirade.

“Yes, please entertain me by crushing all twenty-seven bones in my hand one by one,” she muttered.

“Oh, I’ll crush all your bones alright,” Hidan answered. “All twenty-seven in each hand, all twenty-six in each foot–”

“Unhinge my elbows and shred my skin,” Tori deadpanned.

“I’ll bend your elbows backwards and peel your skin with a potato peelers, you heinous bitch.”

“Sew my mouth shut and pulverize my knees.”

“I’ll sew your mouth shut so you can’t even scream while I–”

Kakuzu cut in. “This conversation has gotten tedious.”

“Fuck you, Kakuzu,” Hidan huffed back. “It’s your fucking fault we’re making a such a huge detour.”

“Our current mission isn’t time sensitive and it will be easier to cross the border from Sound than from Fire–”

The two argued the rest of the way to the Sound border.

In fact, Tori had no idea they’d even crossed a border until they both suddenly stopped. “Fuck,” Hidan swore quietly.

Tori was debating asking why they’d stopped when four shinobi wearing Oto headbands appeared.

“We do have a border check-point, you know,” one of them drawled.

“Must’ve missed it,” Hidan sneered back. He took his scythe from his back and the Oto ninja tensed.

“Wait,” Kakuzu commanded. This caused the Oto ninja to tense up even more. “We have business with Orochimaru.”

The Sound ninja that had addressed them snorted. “Business you had to sneak across the border for?”

This ninja– who Tori decided to call Sloppy-Nin for his shitty hairstyle and attitude– was trying hard to seem casual, but Tori could sense nervousness under his act. She wondered if this is how she’d looked to Kakuzu, and took note of everything about his body language that was giving him away.

“We wish to speak to him directly,” Kakuzu said.

Sloppy-Nin eyed them warily. Tori supposed that, being Orochimaru’s flunkies, they probably recognized the Akatsuki cloaks and wanted to avoid a fight. Good call.

“Sorry, he’s not available right now,” Sloppy-Nin finally said, unsheathing a tanto from his back.

Not such a good call.

Kakuzu dropped her as Sloppy-Nin lunged, catching his blade with one hand. Sloppy-Nin’s eyes widened with horror as Kakuzu ripped the blade from his hand, tossing it aside as his free hand easily snapped the man’s neck.

Tori bit the inside of her cheek to stop from whimpering. Well. This was terrifying. 

Her hands and legs were still tied, so Tori resigned herself to lying in the middle of the battlefield like some sort of very sad, very gothic caterpillar. 

Hidan laughed maniacally as he struck down another shinobi and Kakuzu neatly took out a third with an Earth ninjutsu combo. The fourth ninja– a girl who couldn’t be more than fourteen– turned and fled.

“Let her go,” Kakuzu said as Hidan turned to intercept her. “We need a guide.”

Kakuzu told Hidan to carry Tori, as he needed freedom of movement to track the Sound girl back to Otogakure. This was followed by another argument, which Kakuzu won by hissing out, “The only reason you have all of your limbs right now is because I don’t want to waste time re-attaching them.”

“Why the  _ fuck _ are you covered in ants?” Hidan asked as he bent to pick her up.

“Well,” Tori explained sheepishly, “I am also covered in chocolate syrup, so…”

Hidan stared at her. “Chocolate syrup?”

“Well, okay, I made fake blood out of chocolate syrup and food coloring and–”

“ _ Chocolate syrup? _ ”

“W–well it had to be edible.”

Tori had no idea why she was trying to explain herself to Hidan, but once the floodgates had opened she couldn’t stop.

“It was for a half-o-ween party! And I don’t mind being covered in ants, really!”

Well, they were biting her a little bit, but hey, that was a pleasant distraction from where the ropes were cutting into her skin.

“Kakuzu, the bitch is covered in ants and chocolate fucking syrup and I am  _ not _ fucking touching her.”

“Then make her walk,” Kakuzu snapped back, heading into the woods in the direction the Otogakure girl had gone.

Hidan did not stop the train of muttered swear words as he cut the ropes that had been binding Tori’s ankles and hands. She sighed with relief and massaged her wrists as she followed after Hidan and Kakuzu.

They walked at a brisk pace for several hours. Luckily for Tori, the trees in this forest were widely spaced and easy to pick through. Kakuzu had commanded they be silent so as not to attract more attention from Oto-nin, but considering the amount of noise Tori made trying to keep up with them, she suspected Otogakure knew they were coming and had simply decided to let them pass. 

It was starting to go dark, and Tori’s stomach growled for the third time.

“Fucking seriously?” Hidan snapped, breaking the silence.

“Well excuse me for being a simple mortal girl with simple mortal needs, like food,” Tori answered, crossing her arms. Being sassy with Akatsuki was a bad idea, but she was hungry and tired and covered in forty types of bug bites and too grumpy to not make pissy answers. “All I’ve had to eat in the past two days were takoyaki and chocolate syrup.”

“What the fuck is with you and chocolate syrup?” Hidan asked. Kakuzu actually looked over his shoulder at them, as if he too wanted to know why the girl from another world was covered in chocolate syrup.

“I told you,” Tori whined back, “It was half-o-ween. I was at a costume party, dressed as a vampire.”

“What the shit is half-o-ween?” Hidan asked. 

Tori opened her mouth to explain it was the halfway point to Halloween, realized Hidan wouldn’t know about an Americanized Celtic holiday, unless he  _ did  _ somehow, in which case–

“And what the fuck kind of costume is that?” Hidan asked, ignoring her dumbfounded face and gesturing to… all of her.

Tori pouted. “If you will recall when you original summoned me, I actually looked kind of decent.”

Hidan snorted. “Did not.”

“Enough to fool  _ you _ .”

“Well I didn’t think you were a  _ vampire _ .”

Tori opened her mouth to argue back, but her stomach growled instead. From ahead, Kakuzu gave something like an exasperated growl.

“Hidan,” he said, “give her a food pill. Then both of you shut up.”

Hidan pretended to “accidentally” drop the food pill on the ground. Tori stuck her tongue out at him before picking it up and popping it in her mouth. Her stomach didn’t growl again until they reached Otogakure.

\--

The “village” was more of a series of low stone buildings arranged in a loose circle around a statue of a snake. There was no protective wall, but a ring of huge trees made it impossible to approach the village except from one gap between the massive trunks. A single Oto-nin was standing at attention at this gap, waiting for them.

“Orochimaru-sama is waiting for you,” the shinobi said smoothly.

He led them into one of the stone buildings, which contained a single, mostly barren room, housing only a long stone table with old, polished wooden chairs. They sat down– Hidan swearing and Kakuzu looking annoyed– and a handful of nervous looking civilians appeared with bowls of delicious smelling stew.

“Orochimaru-sama hopes you enjoy his hospitality,” the shinobi stated. “He will be here shortly.”

Neither Hidan nor Kakuzu touched the food. Tori, who hadn’t been exactly sated by the food pill, was tempted, but she supposed she should follow the other two’s lead. She picked up her spoon and twirled it in her fingers.

From what she could recall, pretty much anywhere Orochimaru hung out was actually an underground hideout. So, this place might be… some sort of cover? A hideout they never saw in the manga? She had no idea. It would explain the bizarrely empty atmosphere, though. 

Unless all of Otogakure was just like this, empty and creepy and weird. 

Well.  _ Well. _

Tori swirled the spoon around in the stew some more, stirring up pieces of potato and meat. What was Orochimaru even doing at this point in the story, anyway? She wasn’t exactly clear on where she was in the timeline, nor did she remember much of Orochimaru’s antics particularly well. Didn’t he not have usable arms or something?

She flicked her hand, meaning to spin the spoon, but instead sent it flying across the table. A string of broth droplets followed the spoon as it soared past Kakuzu and Hidan and clattered to the floor.

Neither Kakuzu or the Oto-nin said a word. Tori felt her cheeks grow hot as Hidan turned and mouthed  _ What the fuck? _ at her.

Thankfully, the stone doors groaned open, and Orochimaru entered, flanked by Kabuto and Uchiha Sasuke.

Tori very consciously did  _ not _ shuffle nervously in her chair. She wasn’t sure if Sasuke’s presence was a good thing or a bad thing, but she knew Kabuto wasn’t good news.

“Kakuzu-san,” Orochimaru greeted. “I heard you and your new partner had some sort of business with me.”

“It’s Hidan, asshole,” Hidan said. Everyone ignored him.

“I have a proposition for you,” Kakuzu said, reaching under the table to grip Tori’s wrist. “My partner may have made an interesting discovery.”

Kakuzu briefly summarized Hidan’s ritual to summon the god of death, and how it had instead summoned a strange girl in strange clothing who claimed to be from another world. He conveniently left out the whole god-of-death shenanigan, making it sound as if Hidan met up with him immediately after summoning her.

“At first we were skeptical,” Kakuzu said, “But she claims her people can see other’s fates, and she was able to demonstrate for us.”

Orochimaru and Kabuto both seemed extremely amused by the story, clearly not buying it. Sasuke instead looked slightly suspicious, trying to figure out what was going on behind this ridiculous story.

“And would we be able to see a demonstration of these skills?” Orochimaru asked, almost mockingly.

Kakuzu squeezed Tori’s wrist rather painfully.

“Um…” her mind raced, trying to think of the best things to say without having an angry ninja fly across the room and stab her.

She tried to sound calm and cool as she first turned to Sasuke. “I know you have a dream, well, more of an ambition to kill a certain man… that will come true, but not the way you want it to.”

Sasuke’s eyes widened slightly. It was a vague prediction, but she hoped the wording was close enough to his introduction to ring a bell.

Next she turned to Kabuto. What the heck was up with him at the end? She pretended to size him up while she tried to remember. “You had… adoptive mother, right? She gave you your glasses. I think she’ll be proud of you, eventually.”

Kabuto made no visible reaction, so she turned to Orochimaru.

What was even up with him? She could barely remember his plotline at all.

“Your fate is confusing,” she said finally, scrunching up her face to emphasize her point. “You die, you come back. It’s weird.”

Orochimaru actually laughed.

“Well, as entertaining as that was,” Kabuto said, pushing his glasses up, “it was hardly conclusive. I don’t even have an adoptive mother.”

“Liar,” Tori called out, unbidden, her voice ringing through the room like a bell. It wasn’t an accusation, just a simple statement of fact. Kabuto frowned at her and Orochimaru laughed again.

“She caught you, Kabuto,” the Sannin said. Kakuzu relaxed his grip on her wrist. “There may be some truth to this story after all. What do you think, Sasuke-kun?”

Tori jumped as she realized Sasuke had activated his Sharingan.

“Her chakra is weird,” he said, brows furrowing slightly. “It’s strength and flow aren’t any different from a normal civilian, but it’s… it’s like it’s a different shade of the same color. And the networking is a little different.”

He frowned and leaned back in his chair, letting his eyes fade to black. “The differences are barely perceptible. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for them.”

Kabuto sighed and turned to Orochimaru, ignoring the two Akatsuki and one girl from another world.

“This isn’t conclusive evidence. She could just be a freak.”

Hidan let out a bark of laughter.

Orochimaru peered over at them.

“If she is from another world,” he said, “why bring her to me? Is she, perhaps, a gift?”

“Hardly,” Kakuzu answered. “I intend to sell her.”

Orochimaru raised his eyebrows. “I see.”

What followed was an amazingly tedious game of politics and one-upmanship. First Kabuto and Orochimaru discussed– loudly for the rest of the room to hear– whether or not Tori was a worthwhile investment. A bargaining tactic to talk her price down.

“I suppose, even if she isn’t from another world,” Kabuto sighed, “Her strange chakra might be worth a look.”

Then there was a lot of stress about how  _ maybe _ she was valuable as a  _ small _ project, with lots of sighing to devalue her.

Tori found herself annoyed they were using the same haggling strategies one might use to buy an flea market coffee table.

When they finally made a pitch at Kakuzu, he snapped back with all sorts of vaguely-nice things to say about her (with the motivation of upping her price), which she almost felt flattered by. She had been having a very bad day, after all. 

Tori was pretty sure Hidan had fallen asleep with his eyes open. She was thinking about tipping his untouched stew into his lap when Kakuzu abruptly stood up.

“It’s settled then,” he said.

Orochimaru stood as well. “Indeed. Baku-san, Sasuke-kun, let us finish this business outside. I’m sure Kabuto would like to talk to our new addition in… private.”

Kakuzu kicked Hidan’s chair, and the Jashinist jumped to attention with a start. Sasuke and their Oto-nin guide– Baku, Tori supposed– went to follow the three outside, but Kabuto put his hand on Sasuke’s shoulder.

“Actually,” he said, “I was wondering if I could borrow Sasuke-kun’s eyes for this.”

Sasuke and Kabuto moved to sit across from Tori at the table. A still-nervous looking civilian reappeared and collected Kakuzu and Hidan’s untouched cutlery and stew.

Kabuto smiled good-naturedly at her. It put her on edge.

“Welcome to Otogakure, Miss…?”

“Tori,” she said flatly.

“What a lovely name, Tori-chan. Have you eaten yet?”

He gestured at the stew. She looked down at it then looked back up at him.

“Well?”

“I’m not hungry,” she said flatly.

“It’s not poisoned,” Kabuto said with a light laugh, but there was something steely in his eyes. She was going to eat the stew, or he was going to force her.

Tori glared down at her stew. This entire situation seemed stupid, but she knew it was just a show of power. She was going to eat the food because he said so, just like she was going to do any number of bizarre or awful things in the future simply because he said so. They were setting the tone of their relationship right now.

“I can’t,” she gritted out eventually. “I don’t have a spoon.”

“What?”

“It’s on the floor.” She nodded across the table, to Sasuke’s left. Sasuke slowly turned, then disappeared under the table. He came back up with the spoon in his hand, seeming baffled by its presence.

He handed it to her.

_ I’m also covered in chocolate syrup and dead ants, _ she almost said, just to see his reaction. She held her tongue.

Kabuto stared at her expectantly.

Tori stared from her spoon to the stew and back again.

“Actually,” she said. “Can I have a clean one?”

Kabuto’s eye twitched, but he called back in the civilian servant to get her a new spoon.

Tori hoped she had successfully set the tone of their relationship.

\--

As she slowly ate her cold stew, Kabuto went through a series of questions while Sasuke studied her with his Sharingan. He was the lie detector, Kabuto told her.

She told them about how her world had no ninja, but instead was more technologically advanced. Kabuto was intrigued by some of the technology she mentioned, including cars and the internet, but her knowledge of how they actually worked was vague and he gave up on that line of questioning.

“So tell me,” he said. “can everyone in your world see people’s fates?”

Tori pretended to chew for a very long time, debating how to answer.

“Well…” she said after a while. “I guess everyone can, but no one can see every person’s fate.”

This was true, if you counted “seeing people’s fates” as “knowing what happens next in a TV show.”

She took another bite of stew. Kabuto’s smile was getting steely again.

“What do you mean?”

“Well.” She fiddled with the spoon. “For example, I can see yours and Sasuke’s fates okay, but that other dude– Baku?– I had nothing on him. And then between you and Sasuke, I can see Sasuke’s a lot better.”

Sasuke looked slightly disturbed, but Kabuto seemed intrigued.

“So when you say ‘fate,’” Kabuto said, “does that mean someone’s destiny cannot be changed?”

Tori shrugged, suddenly feeling nervous. “I mean, I don’t think anything’s set in stone. I think what I’m seeing is just like– if nothing acts on that fate. A body in motion, Newton’s Laws, all that.”

Kabuto and Sasuke both looked slightly confused. “Newton?” Kabuto asked.

“You know the… science… dude,” Tori had not meant to change the topic, but she was thankful she had. “The first and second laws of motion? Force equals mass times acceleration?”

Kabuto and Sasuke exchanged looks. Tori nervously explained what she’d learned in eighth grade physical science, and eventually the two ninja nodded in agreement. The concepts existed in this world, but of course they weren’t named after some guy named Newton.

“Are you a scientist, Tori-chan?” Kabuto asked.

“Um, well, I’m only a year into my University degree, but I worked in a bio lab for two years and did my senior project in bio so…”

This led to a comparison of scientific knowledge between worlds, which Tori actually found quite interesting. They didn’t get very far into, though, before she found herself starting to nod off. It was weird; she hadn’t really slept much in the past two days, but usually when she got this tired she could at least keep her eyes open…

“Ah, there she goes, Sasuke-kun,” she heard Kabuto say through a fog. “Watch for any chakra anomalies.”

He had poisoned her after all. Sasuke wasn’t here to be a lie detector; he was here to watch her body’s reaction to the poison.

_ Bastards,  _ Tori thought before losing consciousness.


	3. in which the bechdel test is passed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our heroine has a lot of problems, ninja are bullshit, and a lot of worldbuilding is done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since we have moved to Sound, there is predictably human experimentation that I must list as a **warning** , including experiments involving drug use. 
> 
> This took longer to write than expected, but please enjoy this extra long chapter.

Tori woke up sprawled across a cement floor. There was a rusted drain next to her face. 

Feeling woozy, she sat up. She was alone in a closet-sized room that smelled strongly of bleach. There no windows, and the only light came from a bare bulb overhead. It was a very yellow light that gave her a headache. 

Or maybe the headache was from being drugged. It was difficult to say. 

She patted herself down. There was a patch of gauze on the inside of her left elbow, taped on right over her fishnet sleeve. When she peeled it off, there was a small puncture wound underneath. Had they taken a blood sample? Given her more drugs? There was no way to know. 

The skin around the puncture wound had obviously been cleaned. Other than that, there was no evidence her person had been altered in anyway. She was still covered in grime and smelled rank. She found a candy wrapper in her pocket. 

She had no memory of putting that there, but she highly doubted this world had Werther’s Originals. It might have been there since before the last time she washed her pants.

Her Nalgene bottle was gone. Now the only thing she had left of her world were her clothes and this wrapper, and she felt strangely attached to it. She very carefully smoothed it out, folded it up, and slipped it back into her pocket. 

Standing up gave her a wave of nausea and she leaned against the wall. The room was less than ten feet deep, and narrow enough that if she stood in the center, her finger tips would brush against both walls. 

The only object in the room was an off-white lump shoved into a corner. Upon inspection, it turned out to be a folded futon with matching blanket. The futon was was splotched with yellow-brown water stains. 

Was this… her cell?

Is this how she was meant to live from now on?

She wondered if she should cry. Crying now seemed like a good idea. If she got it all out in private, she was less likely to do it with someone watching.

She didn’t have the energy to cry. Instead, she rolled out the futon, laid down on it, and willed her headache and nausea to go away. 

 

\--

 

Tori was dozing when someone banged open the door and yelled at her to get up. 

Tori removed her arm from her face and squinted up at the person looming over her. It was a teenaged girl, standing with both fist on her hips. Her bright red hair haloed in the artificial light. 

“Karin?” Tori croaked and carefully rolled over and got to her feet. She still felt weird, but the nausea had mostly faded. 

Karin was small in stature, but she gave off the definite air of someone who got her way  _ or else _ . A heavy ring of keys jingled at her hip. 

“Learn to follow orders faster,” Karin snapped. “Follow me.”

She turned on her heel and matched out of the room, not checking to make sure Tori followed. Tori briefly considered staying in her little room; she didn’t like following orders just because she was meant to. She quickly disregarded this thought, though. Karin was deceptively scrawny and shockingly young-looking in person, but she was also a ninja and not a particularly nice person. Tori hurried after her. 

The hallway outside was also devoid of windows and illuminated with the same yellow light. The door to Tori’s… cell, or whatever it was, had “E7” painted on it in faded red. She passed doors E6 through E1 shuffling after Karin.

Tori feet hurt, the soles throbbing from walking too far and the skin of her heels and toes screaming from blisters, but she dared not lag too far behind.

The heavy door at the end of the hall required a key to open, which Karin produced from her ring. Outside was a wider passageway, still windowless but with softer lighting. Tori stared around her, wide-eyed, as Karin led her through several hallways and locked doors. There was very little to see– Oto was not a place for welcoming decoration, it seemed. They only passed one other person, a very tired looking woman pushing a cart. 

Finally, Karin stopped at a large room housing laundry facilities. 

“First, you need a uniform,” she said. “What’s your shoe size?”

Karin pulled over a large canvas bin on wheels, filled with black open-toed shoes. 

“Six,” Tori answered obediently, and Karin gave her a very odd look. Tori was not sure how she’d gotten her own shoe size wrong, but apparently she had. “Thirty-five?” She tried next, since she had a pair of sandals from Peru that said that. Karin continued to look at her as if she were an idiot. “I think… my world has a different sizing system.”

“Kabuto said you’d be difficult,” Karin muttered. “Look, just find a pair that fits, and I’ll grab your clothes.”

Karin wandered further into the laundry room and Tori peered into the bin. Someone had tied the shoes together into pairs with twine, so at least there would be no issue finding a matching set. She hoped that someone had also sterilized the obviously pre-worn shoes. 

When she’d found a pair that looked her size, Tori pulled off one of her boots to try it on. Her socks had once been white with tiny puffins decorating them; now they were a gross red-brown. 

“Those look fine,” Karin declared as Tori stared balefully down at her disgusting socks in the stupid toeless shoes. “You get two uniforms and one towel.” 

Karin launched into an obviously practiced speech about laundry schedules and hygiene standards in Oto, sounding incredibly bored with the whole thing. Then she paused and said, “Usually I make newbies change immediately, but you need, like…. a biohazard decontamination.”

She wrinkled her nose as she gave Tori a once-over. It was a fair point. 

Karin lead her back to E-corridor and the women’s bathroom. It looked shockingly like Tori’s dorm bathroom, with mildew-spotted shower curtains and grimy beige tiles.

“Cool-down showers are only five minutes, but I’ll give you…” Karin trailed off and looked her up and down again. “You know what. Take as long as you want, just get rid of that smell.”

The pile Karin had handed over in the laundry room had consisted of blue plastic bags, labelled in marker. Tori pulled out one labelled WMN UNIFORM and one labelled SHOWER TOWEL (E CORRIDOR). There was another uniform one, and then one WMN UNDERGARMENTS. She peered inside. There were indeed undergarments in there. She pulled out a set and Karin snapped at her to hurry up. 

Tori drew the shower curtain closed behind her and started to pull off her ruined clothing. Underneath her gross socks, her feet were a mess of pussy pink and red blisters. She had random bruises all over her body from being manhandled, and her wrists had been rubbed raw by restraints. 

The water came out unpleasantly hot. Tori didn’t care. 

“Okay, listen up,” Karin said, voice loud and bossy over the sound of the running shower. “In Oto, you have to  _ earn _ trust. We get a lot of people from all over and we can’t just go around letting them do whatever they want.”

There was a dispenser on the wall labelled SOAP - SHAMPOO. Tori used the scentless gel that came out of it to scrub her body and hair down as Karin lectured her on the structure of Oto. She was not to leave her cell without an escort. She would be assigned a job. Meals, bathroom breaks, and sleep were all on a fixed schedule. She belonged to Orochimaru. 

Tori watched the now red-brown soap suds swirl around her feet as Karin droned on and on, clearly bored with her own speech. If Tori proved herself, she’d get special privileges the Oto elite enjoyed, like personal belongings. 

_ Personal belongings. _

“Can I keep my clothes?” Tori asked, interrupting Karin in the middle of reciting things Tori could get access to if she properly surrendered her body to Oto, like fresh fruit and reading materials.

“What?” Karin answered. “No, I’m going to burn them, because they are  _ disgusting _ –”

Tori stood under the water for a few minutes while Karin ranted about how indescribably gross she was. She decided Karin would eventually notice the water now ran clear. She turned it off and toweled down. 

The Oto uniform was a dark grey shirt and matching pants. The set was stiff from cheap laundry detergent, but the sensation of cleanliness felt practically luxurious. 

Toeless shoes were silly, Tori thought as she slid her foot in, but at least they wouldn’t aggravate her blisters.

Karin led her back to what appeared to be a storage closet and made a big deal out of pulling out a red biohazard waste bag and shoving Tori’s last worldly possessions into it. Tori watched, expressionless, as the last bit of her former life was shoved into a bin marked BURNABLE REFUSE. She’d forgotten to rescue the wrapper from her pocket. 

“Right,” Karin said, adjusting her glasses. “I was supposed to take you down to the dining hall, but…” Karin sniffed and turned away. “Well, you can wait until dinner. You wasted a lot of my time, anyway.”

Karin slammed the door closed on Tori’s cell and left her. Tori stood in the middle of the room for a few minutes wondering what to do.

She went with sitting on the floor and raking the tangles out of her damp hair with her fingers. There didn’t seem to be much else she  _ could _ do. 

 

\--

 

Eventually someone else unlocked her cell. It was a man this time, in his early twenties and skinny with his face permanently screwed up like he had just caught whiff of a foul smell. He briefly introduced himself as the commanding officer for Corridors E and F. Tori decided to call him Snarly-Nin. 

There was a queue of children in the same gray uniform following behind Snarly-Nin. Tori obediently got in line behind them and followed them to the mess hall, where she was given a plastic tray containing dry rice, a mysterious salty meat, and green mush. It was all lukewarm with pockets of cold, like it hadn’t been microwaved long enough. 

There were multiple long tables arranged neatly in the hall, and small groups of other ninja sitting at them. Most of them did not wear the grey uniform, but instead clothes closer to what she expected ninja to wear– dark, loose pants and flak jackets. The group Tori had been herded in with all sat together, though, so she followed suit. Even though…. they were all  _ literal children. _ The oldest one couldn’t be more than thirteen. 

Oto sure did recruit them young. 

Tori poked at her meal with the metal spork she was given. It didn’t taste like much, but she was hungry. 

“I can’t wait to get promoted,” the boy sitting next to her lamented. “I heard you get fruit cups then.”

Tori ate her food as quickly as she could and hoped her body continued to be too tired for a wailing breakdown. 

 

\--

 

Tori spent the next three days mostly lying on her futon. Occasionally Snarly-nin would come to shepard her and the other new recruits– and that’s what everyone in the ugly gray uniform was, she learned– to the dining hall to eat disappointing food or to the bathroom. She was told when to bathe and reprimanded for spending too long on the toilet and leaving behind gristle from the mystery meat on her plate. 

She had no timepiece and didn’t know if all this ran on a tight schedule or not. She also didn’t know if the lights shutting off correlated with night time in the real world or not. 

The first time she experienced lights out, she had no warning. One moment she’d been picking scabs off her blisters, and the next it was pitch black. She waved her hand in front of her face, watching the blue-white shape her mind constructed for her in the pitch blackness. 

There was a name for that, she thought. For when your brain gave you an image of something you knew was there but couldn’t see. 

From their gossip, she knew the other new recruits went to training between their meals. One of the boys bragged about finally getting a mission, and how if it went well he’d be promoted and get to leave them behind. She wondered how she would get promoted, if she couldn’t take missions because she wasn’t a ninja.

There were older civilians that staffed Oto. They all looked defeated and tired, with slumped bodies. She saw them in the hallways pushing laundry carts and mops. The women who gave her poorly heated trays of food were civilians. She knew they were civilians because the other new recruits mocked them. 

Would that be her, years from now? 

No, it wouldn’t, because Sasuke was probably fourteen or fifteen and so Oto wouldn’t  _ exist _ like this years from now. 

Should she, like, tell them that…?

No, she decided, fumbling around in the dark for wherever she’d kicked her blanket. She really didn’t think they deserved to know about their on-coming doom. 

 

\--

 

Being left alone for long stretches of time, Tori thought, was probably some sort of psychological conditioning to wear her down. So was most of what she was being forced into here– it was all a game to force compliance. 

The new recruits she ate lunch with didn’t like talking to her. She was older, she wasn’t a ninja, and she was foreign and weird and didn’t know about any of the pop culture they wanted to discuss. Alone at night, she started to wonder if putting her with them was done on purpose to isolate her. 

The thing was, though, that just because she could recognize tactics to make her feel alone and miserable, it didn’t mean those tactics didn’t work. The tactics worked incredibly well. They worked so well that when Karin interrupted her breakfast one morning, Tori beamed at her and greeted her overenthusiastically. 

“Uh, okay,” said Karin, sniffing and letting one hand rest on a popped hip. “Kabuto wants to see you, weirdo.”

Kabuto’s office, as it happened, was a cubicle located in the infirmary. 

The Oto infirmary, as it happened, was terrifying.

There were several tables with restraining buckles dangled from them, adjacent to metallic trays of surgical tools. There were other instruments, hanging from the walls, that looked like they came straight from an American Civil War field surgeon’s kit– bone saws and curved scissors and giant forceps with ridged tips. The medical waste disposal bins were larger than any normal doctor’s office. The entire place smelled heavily of rubbing alcohol. 

Kabuto’s desk, shoved in the corner of the clinic, was startling normal looking, with a few piles of papers and notebooks and even a single decorative figurine of a carved wooden beetle. His desk also had a small digital clock, which read just past 8 o’clock. Tori wondered if that was accurate. It was the first time she’d known the time in days. 

“Do you need anything else?” Karin asked, sounding sweeter than Tori had ever heard her. 

“No, thank you,” Kabuto said with an equally weirdly-sweet smile. Karin left, and Kabuto turned the smile on Tori. Tori experienced a brief and vivid fantasy of crawling into the giant medical waste bin in the corner, pulling the lid down over her, and hiding there for the rest of her life. 

Instead of doing that, Tori said awkwardly, “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Kabuto answered. “How have you been adjusting, Tori-chan?”

A lifetime of social conditioning pushed Tori to tell him she was fine, just fine, even if that was a blatant lie. She hesitated though, the dumb friendly smile she’d put on for Karin still stuck on her face. She didn’t think Kabuto actually cared either way. What did he  _ want _ her to say?

“I know it can be difficult,” Kabuto said, turning back to his desk and arranging stack of papers. “But I hope with time you’ll be able to make friends.”

Um… okay?

Kabuto gestured for her to climb onto one of the examination tables. Paper lining had been pulled over it ( _ for bodily fluids, _ Tori’s mind helpfully reminded her), and the buckled restraints dangled ominously from it. Tori stiffened. She’d had time to sit and wallow in all the terrible things they could do to her. She’s had time to lie in the dark and try to remember the entire wikipedia article on torture. 

She’d read that article in full, once, because torture seemed interesting when you were confident it couldn’t happen to you. 

All of her muscles tensed. She really, really didn’t want to get on that table. 

“Well?” Kabuto asked, voice soft and low.

She had no dumb or sassy excuse not to. If she didn’t do this under her own power, Kanuto would  _ make _ her. 

Feeling like a prisoner sent to walk the plank, she climbed onto the examination table. 

Kabuto proceeded to give her a completely normal physical. He was very professional about it and healed all her leftover blisters and major bruises, his green healing chakra feeling cool and tingly. It wasn’t weird at all, aside from the very bizarre feeling of Kabuto touching her feet. The dichotomy between her expectations and reality left Tori dizzy.

When he was done, Kabuto gave her one critical once-over and clicked his tongue.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, Tori-san,” he chided, “But in Oto we take care of our comrades. Don’t be so nervous.”

Then in a complete one-eighty from his reassurances, he pulled out a clipboard and announced that Orochimaru wanted him to run a few medical tests. 

“Just to understand some things about you, Tori-chan,” he said gently.

She wondered if that worked on the younger recruits. 

She watched blandly as he tied a tourniquet around her arm and slipped a needle under her skin. She let her legs swing as he filled vial after vial, her fingers slowly losing strength from blood loss. 

“What are you even going to do with all of that?” she asked, now feeling lightheaded. 

“You know, the usual tests,” Kabuto said vaguely. “Your antigen profile, chakra residues…”

“I’m O positive,” Tori said. Then because Kabuto tipped his head like she’d said something interesting, she went on: “What’s a chakra residue? Do you even use ABO blood groups? Because you don’t have the same shoe sizes. In my world, O means no antigen–”

She blabbered. Kabuto leaned in and listened very raptly. Part way through explaining Rh groups, Tori remembered that ABO blood groups were definitely a thing in this world, because there was a scene in the manga where Orochimaru asked Kabuto for his. Japanese culture connected ABO groups to personality types; it was like asking a Westerner if they had horoscopes.

So then what was Kabuto listening to her for, then? Something incriminating? Secrets of the state?

“Oh, but you do know all that, right?” she finished. “Because you’re type AB.”

Kabuto didn’t look surprised, exactly, but something sharpened in his eyes.

Now, if only Tori had memorized the databooks and knew everyone else’s blood types. That sure would be a trick to show off. 

The next test Kabuto did involved holding wooden plates up to Tori’s skin, which really threw her for a loop. The plates were pentagonal, about the size of her hand, and had fancy looking characters painted on them. Kabuto pulled on nitrile gloves before handling them.

“They absorb chakra,” he explained when she’d looked confused. He had rolled up her sleeve to the shoulder and was pressing plate after plate against her upper arm. “The seals will change over time to give information.”

“Huh,” she said. Then she decided to go out on a limb and asked, “What is chakra, anyway?”

“Energy, basically,” he said dryly.

She narrowed her eyes at him. Her vision was swimming from the loss of blood and chakra. “Is that like ATP hydrolysis?”

Kabuto didn’t know what that was. Tori hadn’t thought about it properly in a while, and her brain was so fuzzy. “You have three phosphates, and then you cut one off and energy comes out.”

Kabuto gave her a very strange look. 

Once he was done collecting chakra, Kabuto summoned Karin back and she humphed and complained as Tori dragged herself out of the clinic and back to her cell, leaning against the wall the whole way. 

“If one session took that much out of you,” Karin said, nose in the air, “then you’re not going to make it very far in Oto.”

She slammed the door closed to Tori’s room, and Tori suddenly refound her ability to cry. 

 

\--

 

It was stupid to cry, she decided after she’d bawled her eyes out. Karin was right: she needed to toughen up if she was going to survive this. There was no point in mooning and crying and wasting time in the bathroom trying to hide the fact that she had been crying. 

“Hurry up,” Snarly-nin snapped, and grabbed her by the back of her shirt and dragged her away from the sink to join the rest of the group outside. The girl who’d told on her for wasting time jeered at her.

At dinner, the new recruits discussed when the last time they’d had a banana was. A few of them had never even had a banana, which Tori thought was odd. 

“We used to get them in the market all the time,” the girl who’d tattled on her boasted. Her name, if Tori wasn’t mistaken, was Haruka. “We’re the only city in the Land of Iron to get imports from Water Country regularly.”

Haruka was easily the most interesting in the group, Tori thought. At thirteen, she was the second oldest after Tori, and she came from a samurai family that had been killed or banished or something like that. Haruka had been a thug for hire for a bit before Orochimaru had scooped her up. 

“You mean you  _ were _ ,” a boy who might have been named Kisuke corrected. “You’re here now.”

“Yeah,” Haruka agreed, then picked at her food for a bit before launching into a description of what bananas tasted like. A girl from a northern country leaned into the story with wide, hungry eyes.

Tori wondered what would happen if the poor girl found out about mangos. 

Deciding to integrate herself into the group, Tori asked, “Has anyone ever had a passion fruit?”

No one answered, but Haruka rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. Tori didn’t know if that meant no one had or if everyone had and she might as well have asked, “Who else here has tried mustard before?”  

Maybe it was because passion fruits were a new world fruit? Did they have new world foods here? No, of course they did, they had potatoes and tomatoes…

When Karin fetched her again the next morning, Tori asked about passion fruits. 

“You say a lot of weird things,” Karin said instead of giving a real answer.

Instead of making real conversation, then, Tori found herself earnestly explaining what a passion fruit was. “It’s got like a leathery shell, and then the part that’s edible inside looks like yellow frogs’ eggs, except instead of baby frogs it’s seeds.”

“A baby frog is a tadpole,” Karin corrected. 

“Where do your potatoes come from?” Tori asked, keeping the discussion on track. 

“I don’t think a new recruit needs to know our supply chains,” Karin snapped, and that was the end of that. 

When Tori was left with Kabuto, the first thing he did was hand her a slip of paper. Tori took it without question, and then Kabuto leaned down to examine it in her hand. 

“As expected,” he said, then straightened up and turned to make some notes. 

“Um,” said Tori, looking down at the paper. It looked completely normal, the size of an index card and the weight of printer paper. When it was obvious Kabuto wasn’t going to explain what was going on to her, Tori asked, “Is there something that was supposed to happen…?”

“It’s chakra induction paper,” Kabuto said, leafing through papers at his desk with a small frown on his face. “It changes based on elemental affinity. You don’t have one.”

Tori blinked down at the paper in surprise. She’d always wondered, the way anyone might idly wonder about the fantastic, what her elemental affinity might be. To hear it was  _ nothing _ was disappointing, to say the least. All those personality tests had lied to her. 

“Is that common?” she asked. 

“It’s not unheard of,” Kabuto answered. “But it’s not common, no. If you were raised in a shinobi village, it might be considered a sort of disability, but otherwise it won’t affect your life.”

Tori hadn’t exactly been worried about that; she didn’t anticipate finding out chakra affinity to impact her life in any way. It just would have been nice to know she had the potential to sneeze fireballs or shoot lightning out of her hands. 

The other tests Kabuto had for her today were all physical tests. He tested her reflexes, hitting her knee with a small mallet and shining a light in her eyes, and then asked her to go through a series of strength and flexibility exercises, which was sort of like being in high school gym again. 

He let her take lunch in the clinic, and then Orochimaru showed up with a folder full of photographs.

“Orochimaru-sama always likes to see the more interesting parts of experiments,” Kabuto said plainly, his voice just a tad softer than usual. 

_ Well, _ thought Tori,  _ shit.  _

Orochimaru didn’t even greet her. He just dropped his folder on Kabuto’s desk and started leafing through the notes Kabuto had kept on her. 

“Ah, you’re right,” Orochimaru murmured to Kabuto. “She’s not very biologically interesting.”

Tori wondered if everyone in this world thought it was socially acceptable to talk disparagingly about people when they were sitting right there in the room with them, or if it was just a ninja thing. 

“Well, maybe we’ll find something today,” Orochimaru said with a pleasant smile that made Tori’s skin crawl. 

He spread a series of glossy photos out in front of her. “Do you recognize any of these people?”

Tori frowned down at the spread, pretending to concentrate while internally she panicked. He was trying to probe her made-up abilities, which happened to be the only thing interesting enough about her to keep her alive. She absolutely could not screw this up. 

“Future sight doesn’t work on photos,” she said finally, looking up to meet his eyes. Mistake. Orochimaru’s eyes were terrifying. She turned back down at the photos. “But I recognize some of these people from Sasuke’s future.”

Orochimaru leaned in, his terrifying eyes focused solely on Tori and looking as if he might want to eat her. “Tell me about them.”

The photos were mostly people from Oto. Tori wasn’t very good at faces, but she recognized some of the weirder hairstyles from the cafeteria. Some of the photos were of deceased people, too; she recognized Kimimaro and some of the Sound Five. 

The first photo she pulled was Juugo. He was snarling at the camera, eyes wild as an animal. 

“Juugo is surprisingly mild-mannered around Sasuke,” Tori said. “I don’t really understand what his problem is, but it helps to be around Sasuke’s…. chakra, I guess?”

“Sasuke and Juugo interact?” Kabuto asked, sounding surprised. 

_ Oops, _ Tori thought. She didn’t want to tell them Sasuke was planning to murder Orochimaru, and she didn’t want to say anything that would indicate Orochimaru would never get to take Sasuke’s body, lest that upset him. 

“Sasuke starts putting together a team to track down his brother,” Tori said slowly. “He’s very focused on it.”

Orochimaru laughed softly, covering his mouth and glancing at Kabuto as if to say,  _ Isn’t that the truth? _

Tori pulled Suigestu’s photo next. “Sasuke also recruits Hozuki Suigetsu. And… Karin isn’t here, but her too.” 

“How does he convince Karin to go along with him?” Kabuto asked, crossing his arms. “They don’t get along.” 

“They don’t?” Tori asked, frowning down at the photos, trying to recognize other people. “Karin likes him, though, and he’s very respectful of her tracking abilities…”

Should she tell them she recognized the Sound Five too? They were dead, so it wasn’t like she could say she saw Sasuke meeting them in the future.

“Can you see Karin’s future, Tori-san?” Orochimaru asked. “She said you knew her name before you were told.”

“Um…” said Tori, shifting in her seat. “A little bit. It’s mostly focused on Sasuke, though…” 

Orochimaru asked a few more questions, and prodded Tori into telling the stupid bear story from Karin’s chuunin exam, and that Juugo was the basis for Orochimaru’s cursed seal. 

“But what  _ is _ a cursed seal?” Tori asked, wide-eyed. 

“Maybe one day we’ll talk more about it,” Orochimaru said vaguely. Then he turned to Kabuto and asked, “Have you confirmed she’s from another world yet?”

Kabuto pushed his glasses up his nose and launched into a long explanation of Tori’s physical and chakra profiles not being far enough outside the average to be abnormal. Her antibody profile, however, was bizarre. 

“Were you a very sickly child?” Orochimaru asked, scanning the paper Kabuto handed him. 

“I mean… I was average healthy?” Tori said slowly. “I used to get a lot of ear infections.”

Did that count as sickly? She started to lean over the spread of photos to see if she could get a peek of the paper Orochimaru was reading, then realized what she was doing and stopped immediately. One did not simply read over Orochimaru’s shoulder. 

“You have antibodies against antigens we’ve never even seen before,” Orochimaru said, sounding delighted. 

“How did you even test for them, then?” Tori asked, dumbfounded. 

“Some of them seem worrisome,” Kanuto said, but kept going before Tori could ask,  _ How could you possibly know that if you’ve never seen the thing causing the antibody? _ “You’ve never been hospitalized with fever?”

“No,” Tori said. “I get my flu shot every year.”

Both Orochimaru and Kabuto gave her a very strange look. 

“I get the annual influenza vaccine,” Tori elaborated. 

The strange looks stayed in place. 

_ Oh my god, you’re kidding me,  _ Tori just barely managed not to say. 

As it turned out, this world didn’t have vaccines. Or rather, they did– they were just produced through some wild method that involved intricate seals that didn’t make any sense to Tori, and were basically only used on shinobi going into high-risk areas. 

“Of course, a good medic can disrupt pathogen membranes with chakra,” Orochimaru said, making a vague gesture at Kabuto. 

_ Of course you can use chakra to bullshit your way out of disease,  _ Tori thought. 

Orochimaru pressed her for more information on vaccination programs where she came from. She told him what she knew of how they were made and how they worked, and then about what sorts of diseases were standard to vaccinate against in her country. Apparently the Naruto world somehow didn't have things like measles or whooping cough. No wonder everyone had been so terrified of Dead Water Fever. 

When they’d exhausted that topic, Kabuto cut in. 

“Other than the strange antibody profile,” Kabuto said, grabbing another paper form his desk, “She has a lot of odd behavior that would support that she really believes she’s from another world.”

Kabuto read off a list of weird things Tori had said or done, including not knowing standard shoe sizes and describing the imaginary passion fruit. When did he even have time to find out about that? Did Karin tell him while Tori was focusing on lunch?

“Passion fruits are real,” Tori insisted. “Where do potatoes come from?”

Orochimaru dipped his head to one side, silky black hair falling over his shoulder, as if Tori were an especially interesting beetle he’d found on his garden wall. 

“Asking questions is good,” he said finally. “Maybe learn to ask better ones.”

He left, leaving Tori feeling vaguely lightheaded. That hadn’t been so bad. That hadn’t been bad at all. 

It was after her scheduled dinner time, and Kabuto escorted her back to her cell himself without even mentioning the prospect of food. She fell asleep hungry. 

 

\--

 

Tori was finally assigned a job in the stockrooms. Every morning she went through her assigned inventories with a checklist and recorded how much they had of everything. She then turned this in to an older kunoichi, who was in charge of keeping track of how quickly things were used and deciding what needed to be ordered. 

It was almost an interesting job. Tori liked seeing all the huge containers of food in the kitchen storeroom and how basic weaponry was stored in the armory. Her favorite was the medical storeroom, which featured all sorts of medicines and compounds kept in old fashion glass bottles. It made her feel like an alchemist. 

There was another shinobi who also turned in papers to the old kunoichi, who Tori supposed must look after other stock units. 

“Tori Mendoza,” Tori introduced herself, making sure to give off the friendliest smile possible. “I’m very excited to be working… inven- _ Tori.” _

She stuck her hand out to shake and grinned even wider. The shinobi looked at her hand like maybe it wasn’t very clean and very firmly ignored her presence after that. 

In this way, mornings in Oto were fine. She could usually find at least five or six thoughts and daydreams to distract her from other, more worrying aspects of her life, like her afternoons. 

In the afternoons, Tori reported to Kabuto’s clinic, where he demonstrated that her assessment of human experimentation being “not that bad” was entirely incorrect. 

“Eat these,” Kabuto said the first afternoon she went in after being assigned to inventory. He handed her a tiny paper cup containing two brown tablets. 

“What are they?” Tori asked.

“Don’t worry, they’re just soldier pils,” Kabuto said. “Eat them.”

Tori, understandably, was very resistant to the idea of eating strange pills a trained assassin had just handed her. 

“Aren’t you not supposed to take more than one at once?” she said, delicately taking the tiny cup from him. 

“You’ll be fine,” Kabuto said, sounding incredibly assuring. Tori knew this was a lie, but she felt better anyway. She ate them. 

“Take your shirt off,” Kabuto commanded, and Tori reminded herself that he was a medical professional and her Oto-issued underwear included a high-power sports bra that covered her entire chest anyway. 

With medical tape, Kabuto attached a bunch of the chakra-absorbing wooden plates to exposed parts of her skin. Tori started to feel the effects of the soldier pills, her heart racing and her brain suddenly restless and unfocused. Her arms twitched and she watched the characters painted on a plate on her forearm slowly rearrange themselves. 

She wanted to do something, and she wanted to do something  _ now. _

Down the hall was a room that was some sort of training facility, equipped with sets of weights and benches for stretches. Kabuto made her run around the small track. The first few laps were fine; she’d never been much of a runner, but she felt like she’d just downed three energy drinks. She did tire quickly, though, and Kabuto insisted she keep going in quiet, deadly tones. He made her keep going until she couldn’t any more. 

Karin reappeared while Kabuto was peeling the tape off to gather his chakra plates. He was kneeling over Tori, having left her where she’d collapsed on the track. 

“That didn’t take very long,” Karin observed, sounding bored. “I thought I’d have more time to review disciplinary files.”

“She’s a civilian,” Kabuto said, holding up a plate to examine it in the light. “Even with soldier pills, she can’t do very much.”

Tori could do so little that Kabuto had to put her shirt back on for her and Karin had to support her weight on the way back to her cell. Tori’s cheeks burned with humiliation. 

It continued like this for a while. In the mornings, Tori took inventory, and then in the afternoons, Kabuto fed her odd drugs, or made her do physical exercises until she couldn’t anymore, or had her do mathematics and puzzles while under the stress of drugs or mild electrical shocks. One day, he gave her something that ended with her vomiting and hallucinating on the infirmary floor, wailing and crying and crawling pathetically, and whatever the experiment was that day had to be cancelled. 

She didn’t remember how she got back to her cell after that, but when she was lucid again, there was a tupperware of light soup in her cell with a little note from Orochimaru to feel better. 

She stared at the note dully. It was on light blue cardstock in careful lettering. She wondered if Orochimaru had written it himself (why would he?) or if someone just sat around writing fake cards on his behalf. She could see how this might be comforting to a younger person who didn’t have proper parental figures, like most of the people in her recruitment cohort, but to her it just felt  _ weird. _

Or… maybe he  _ wanted _ her to feel weird. She wasn’t going to pretend she might be better at mind games than the combined power of Orochimaru and Kabuto. 

Lights went out and she still hadn’t touched the soup. Tori hadn’t vomited since she was a very small child, and the idea of eating food and possibly doing it again filled her with dread. Still, by morning she was hungry, and she dutifully walked with her recruitment cohort to the dining hall. 

“You look like shit,” Haruka said bluntly. 

“She looks like an onibaba,” one of the boys cried. The rest of the children started screaming about how she looked like a demon granny, until Snarly-Nin yelled at them all to shut up. 

Tori followed the line to the dining hall feeling very, very tired. 

“What is an onibaba?” she asked Haruka when they’d sat down with breakfast, which was undercooked brown rice and salted fish. 

“Ugh,” was all Haruka said, then she picked up her tray and moved to the other side of the table. 

Tori did her inventory duties in a vague haze. After lunch, she walked as slowly as she could to the infirmary, delaying having to meet with Kabuto as much as possible, like a naughty child sent to the principal’s. When she did make it there, Orochimaru was sitting at Kabuto’s desk, relaxing in the swivel chair like it was his favorite armchair. 

Tori thought she should be afraid. Her whole body ached, though, and her brain was numb from exhaustion and humiliation, and she didn’t think she had it in her to experience new emotions right now. 

“You’re wasting your time on this,” Orochimaru was saying to Kabuto. “These experiments are redundant.”

Tori stood in the middle of the room feeling dead on her feet and waited for them to acknowledge her. Kabuto murmured some apologies, and Orochimaru tutted and said, “If you can’t think of anything else, you might as well skip to the vivisection and then send her off to housekeeping or food service or wherever full-time. I’m bored with her.”

The word  _ vivisection _ cut through Tori’s existential apathy like a knife. A weird hiccup of fear escaped her, and they both turned to her. 

“Ah, Tori, I didn’t see you there,” Orochimaru said, and Tori wanted to scream at him that of course he saw her because he was a badass ninja and a  _ liar.  _

“Don’t worry,” Orochimaru said, “Kabuto has very steady hands, and I’ll be directing, so there’s no need to–”

Half of Tori’s mind said,  _ Yes, it’ll be just like routine surgery for them, nothing to fear, _ and then the other half yelled at that half to  _ shut the fuck up.  _

“I don’t really see,” Tori said, her voice weirdly high and on the verge of cracking, “how a  _ vivisection _ is going to show you anything interesting. You’re just testing things at random, none of your experiments have had any controls, I don’t think those stupid wooden plates even give you real time data–”

She had to stop because she could feel herself on the verge of tears. She took and deep breath and attempted to calm herself, even though Orochimaru was looking at her with a terrible sort of interest in his eyes. 

Did he want her to keep going? Did he want her to break down sobbing? What would get her out of being sliced open and have her organs poked and examined?

“If you gave me an anatomy book,” Tori said in a very quiet and desperate voice, “I could just tell you if anything’s different from–”

“Tori,” Orochimaru interrupted. His voice sounded like honey, rich and velvety sweet, and it made her want to flee. “What do you think Kabuto is testing for?”

“I– he–” Tori’s eyes darted between the two of them. Kabuto’s face was perfectly blank. She took and deep breath and commanded her voice not to crack or seize up. “Most experiments are to see how my chakra reacts to stresses on the body. I think, before you move on to invasive measures, you could do some qualitative tests on my future vision–”

Orochimaru turned from her to Kabuto, suddenly not interested in listening to Tori at all. “Vivisection was unlikely to be informative anyway. Where does she work?”

Tori was reassigned to the research lab. She nearly wet her pants. 

 

\--

 

Orochimaru’s lab was huge– maybe even bigger than the giant chemistry labs meant for tens of students she’d had classes in in university. It was hard to judge space: where the student labs had been rows of work benches and sinks, this one dedicated a lot more space to shiney metal tables and… more surgical equipment. Which.  _ Great. _

There were familiar things, too: racks of test tubes, cabinets of carefully labelled reagents, fumigation hoods, flasks and beakers of all sizes, chemical-sweet smells and artificial lights. And then there were terrifyingly unfamiliar things, like the operation tables and a glass-front refrigerators filled with opaque containers that reminded her, alarmingly, of specimen processing in her mother’s blood bank. There were also, baffling, what looked like calligraphy sets scattered along the work benches. 

For all the space, though, there was only a single shinobi in the lab when Karin dropped her off. He was old for a ninja (or at least a Sound ninja), perhaps in his early thirties and balding. 

“Keizo-san,” Karin greeted. “We found you an assistant.”

Keizo had his back to them, mixing something in the fumigation hood. “Good,” he grunted. “I swear to God, Karin, if this one gets sent on a suicide mission too–”

He turned around fully, taking Tori in. “Oh,” he said, impressing unprecedented amounts of disappointment into that single syllable. 

“I’m Tori,” Tori said politely. “Nice to meet you.”

She did not extend her hand to shake, because apparently that wasn’t something they did here. 

“What the fuck is this?” Keizo sneered. 

“Tori-san is a recent acquisition,” Karin answered, her voice silky sweet and just as polite as Tori’s, yet somehow a million times more dangerous. “ _ Orochimaru-sama  _ thought she could pick up that project you dropped.”

Karin stretched out every syllable of their boss’s name like a song, and Keizo stiffened. Tori wasn’t sure if Orochimaru had personally weighed in on what she ought to be doing in the lab or if Karin had used the name-drop as a power play, but either way Keizo grumbled for Tori to sit down and not touch anything while he finished up in the hood. She sat in a stool near one of the calligraphy sets, and Karin left them be.

The calligraphy set consisted of a box of brushes and a dark stone inkwell. There were also two of what Tori guessed were ink sticks, and a roll of black fabric. There was nothing particularly scientific about it, and Tori spent the next ten minutes or so staring at it and wondering what its purpose was. There were four other ones, too, scattered around the lab. 

Then Keizo got up from his work at the hood, disappeared into another room for a minute, and then unceremoniously dropped some type of organ in front of her. 

More specifically, he slammed a tray down in front of her, and then dropped the organ onto it with an alarming  _ splat _ noise. Tori had actually no idea what the organ even was. It was big, dark red with blood, and oblong with slippery smooth skin. Not a pancreas, then; that was the one major human organ she thought she couldn’t ID on sight, but in textbook drawings the pancreas always looked like it was made of bubble wrap. A deformed and enlarged kidney, maybe?

“Spleen,” Keizo said by way of explanation. “This one’s already been treated. So you just have to…”

He paused, grabbed a notebook off a shelf, and leafed through it. 

“Yeah, okay,” he continued, slapping the notebook down next to the spleen. “You weigh it, write it down. Then you cut out the bone fragments, and weigh it without them. The sample’s name is Yamaguchi Suzume.”

Tori stared at the notebook. Someone had filled a page with a chart listing each sample’s name, the weight of the spleen in total before and after experiment treatment, then the weight “de-boned,” and then a calculation of how much of the post-experimental mass had been bone. Yamaguchi Suzume’s name was already filled in with her “pre-experiment” weight, along with five others. The names of the samples were  _ people’s _ name. Not impersonal alphanumeric codes, the names of actual people, probably the people the spleen had come from–

Wait.

_ Why the hell would a spleen have bones? _

After rummaging through some drawers, Tori found a glass stirring rod. She poked the spleen with it. It jiggled.

_ Bones? BONES? _

“Weigh it first, shitstain,” Keizo barked. 

Tori found a box of gloves before she found the scale, and she pulled them on. She paused at the scale, and then in an embarrassingly nervous voice, asked Keizo what she should use to put the spleen on the scale.

Keizo, who was weighing out some sort of powder on the other side of the lab, snarled at her and told her to just put the spleen on the scale as-is.

Tori blinked down at the digital scale’s plate, which indeed bore rust-colored stains, as if someone was in fact in the habit of putting bloody organs right on it. That seemed like poor lab maintenance, which she was against on principle, so she measured the basin with the the spleen inside, hit the ‘zero’ button, and then picked the spleen up. She recorded the absolute value of ‘zero minus the weight of a spleen,’ which seemed like bad science, but slightly better science than ‘just throw it on.’

Then came the problem of step two, ‘de-bone the spleen.’ Which. What the  _ hell _ .

Tori had wanted to be a doctor and planned her life around one day cutting up human organs. Or at least into humans. Or, well, going to medical school, specifically, but that would _ involve those things _ . 

The point was, Tori had anticipated handling human organs at some point in her life, but she had assumed it would come with some sort of instructions. 

She had to go into the Horrifying Surgical Zone of the lab to find a razor blade. She found a whole drawer of them, carefully wrapped in cardboard, right under a display of tools that could just as easily be for torture as for medicine. 

Her first cut into the spleen was very awkward. She decided she should cut it in half long-ways, because that would give her a lot of surface area to find the… bones. (Bones??) Wherever spleen-bones may be. She stabbed the blade into the organ and then just… looked at it.

She’d expected it to ooze out blood, like juice from ripe fruit. Instead it just sort of… blurped. Barely any resistance. No bubbling out of juices. Very dull. 

Huh.

She moved it, cutting across the spleen, and some blood did come out, but it wasn’t the horrorshow she was expecting. 

When the spleen was completely in two, she stared down at it and discovered there were actually tiny fragments of bone floating in the flesh of the organ, like seeds in an apple. They were all randomly arranged, and all more or less the size of her pinky nail. That… really wasn’t supposed to happen, or else Tori had deeply misunderstood something about human anatomy. What kind of an experiment _ was  _ this?

It took a lot of cutting to remove the bone shards, and then more to be sure they were all out, and by the end the spleen could be roughly described as minced meat.

That meant she couldn’t use the same technique as last time to measure, because she could no longer just pick up the entire spleen. She found what she was pretty sure was a crucible, zeroed its mass, and then shoveled the spleen bits like chunky play-dough back into its container. 

She filled in the rest of the chart. There were previous eleven entries, and Yamaguchi Suzume had an average amount of bones… in her her  _ spleen _ …

Tori flipped through more of the lab notebook. The notes in previous pages were on sample preparation, which included a lot of notes on surgical removal, preservation, and genetic splicing that didn’t really make sense to Tori, in part because they included a lot of doodles of shinobi seals. 

Well. That would explain all the calligraphy sets, at least. 

In Tori’s world, a lot of biological research depended on hijacking the metabolic processes already in use by living creatures. If Tori wanted to splice foreign DNA into the genome of someone’s spleen, she’d have to chemically isolate DNA, use an enzyme based on an enzyme from a deep sea vent bacteria to copy it, use more designer enzymes to cut out the the piece of DNA she wanted… and then she wasn’t sure how things like viral vectors and CRISPR gene editing worked, but those were techniques based on viral infections and the bacterial immune system, respectively. Tori didn’t think one  _ could _ reliably insert a brand new gene into a whole, grown organ like that, anyway. 

She frowned very intensely down at the lab notebook. There were a lot of pages on testing different sealing arrays, which just… transferred the gene of interest from one sample to the other. No sequences, no chart of enzymatic activity, just page after page of meaningless squiggles. Tori would have to spend forever pipetting clear liquids into each other, but these people just drew a fancy drawing and bam, science. 

Tori was so caught up trying to divine meaning from the lab notebook that she didn’t notice Keizo until he was breathing down her neck.

“Quit goofing off,” he snapped, and Tori nearly jumped out of her skin. “There’s more in the fridge.”

There were indeed more spleens in the glass-faced fridged, sitting in plastic tubs like dinner leftovers. The first one Tori pulled had a single, huge ossified chunk that composed almost half the mass. Tori was unsure if this meant to experiment had gone well or not. She added a column for notes on the morphology of the bone mass.

Tori got through one more dissection before she was shooed away to lunch, after which she reported to Kabuto’s clinic in much better spirits than she had had in days. 

“Does all your science rely on seals?” Tori asked as Kabuto went through his usual ritual of taping wooden plates to her. “We have a lot of, um, chemical kits…”

She tried to explain how to isolate DNA for a civilian. Kabuto did not seem to be listening. He gave her a dixie cup of a sweet liquid to drink. It made her whole world go sideways, and Kabuto made her run laps until she vomited her disappointing lunch back up.

At dinner she drank the juice box she was given and ate part of the rice. She pushed the rest of her food– the world’s saddest boiled shrimp and some extremely limp pickled vegetables– around uselessly on the tray, still hungry but unwilling to eat, and then announced that any of the new recruits could have it if they wanted.  

A fist fight broke out. Tori watched dully as one little new recruit set another one on fire with a jutsu. Haruka, the samurai girl, leapt into the fight swinging her naginata and screaming at everyone to shut up. 

No one else in the cafeteria intervened. Fights weren’t uncommon, although they rarely got this out of hand. One of the new recruits– a ten year old boy– lost two fingers to Haruka. He scooped them up and ran out of the cafeteria red-faced and crying. Snarly-nin, who watched them like a hawk from the door of the mess hall, rolled his eyes exaggeratedly before running after the boy. 

Tori comforted herself with the thought that Kabuto could probably stick the fingers back on. She couldn’t tell if she actually cared anymore. 

 

\--

 

“This is good,” Orochimaru told her several days later, flipping through her section of the lab notebook. Tori had gone through all the spleens in the specimen fridge and expanded the chart with extra notes. “Why didn’t you get through it faster?”

Tori twitched. She didn’t know what would happen if she failed this review. She could, perhaps, die. 

She didn’t  _ want _ to die. 

She gave him her best sweet smile.

“She only comes in in the mornings,” Keizo grunted. He’d been hovering nervously at Orochimaru’s shoulder as he flipped through Tori’s notebook. 

There was a lab bench, closest to the surgical beds, that was ostensibly Orochimaru’s. It was a mess of test tubes and pipettes left out, some with samples still inside. Calligraphy brushes and inkstones were scattered at a random. While Tori and Keizo had bottles of useful reagents carefully stored in the shelves above their benches, Orochimaru’s were left wherever he’d been last using them. 

Since Tori had been transferred to the lab, Orochimaru had spent the entire week “indisposed.” She didn’t dare question what that meant. 

“She also missed two mornings,” Keizo continued, sounding accusatory. Tori kept smiling, trying to seem as pleasant as possible. 

“Kabuto needs me as a participant in your experiments, Orochimaru-sama,” Tori said, and then felt immediately disgusted with her own simpering. 

Tori had missed two full days of work because Kabuto had given her something that had made her so paranoid she’d had several screaming fits in her room and Snarly-nin had just left her. Her last forty eight hours had mostly been a blur of feeling Really Bad and picking a lot of skin off her fingers and arms in nervousness, and she wasn’t sure what she would do if Orochimaru announced he wanted to vivisect her again. 

Scream, probably. And then maybe vomit, since that was a thing she did now. 

“Oh, those aren’t mine. Kabuto is very gungho about his little tests,” Orochimaru said with the same hint of amusement that an indulgent parent might have. “I think you make him nervous, Tori.”

He smiled at her, warm and inviting. Bile churned in Tori’s stomach. She copied him, a toothless and disarming grin. 

“I don’t see why,” she said after a beat when she was sure she wasn’t going to hurl. 

“Well,” Orochimaru said, snapping the notebook shut. “You know how former spies are with their secrets.”

Tori absolutely did not. She watched Orochimaru toss the notebook back onto her bench and listened to him give Keizo a string of orders, starting with critiques of Keizo’s own work and follow-up experiments he wanted. 

“I want to continue the ossification project,” he finished in a very calm way that made Tori want to do whatever he said immediately. “If you can’t handle it and your current experiments at once, teach Tori the seals.”

Kabuto stopped summoning her to his clinic, and Tori started learning ninja science full-time.

Keizo did not care about whatever she had to say about how things were done at her old lab. He rolled his eyes and complained when she didn’t even know how to hold the calligraphy brush correctly. He sighed deeply when she didn’t know any of the six standard arrays for seals. He gave up talking to her when she asked what chakra was made of. 

After several futile hours on the first day, Keizo left her alone with an introductory book on sealing while he puttered around his side of the lab. The book was obviously for children, and relied on Tori already knowing a lot of chakra theory she was missing. Still, she dutifully practiced the six standard arrays that made up the first half of the book. Hers looked ugly and lopsided, but the book assured her she could still get results from malformed brushstrokes as long as she had “proper stroke order and high quality chakra.”

What did that  _ mean? _

Chakra, Keizo had recited in a bored tone before he’d abandoned Tori to teach herself, was found in all bodily tissues, and sealing ink used human blood, so she should be able to craft and use seals without being able to mold chakra. 

Learning seals was… boring. Boring was the word. It was repetitive, she wasn’t very good at it, this world continued to fail to adequately explain what chakra was anyway, and she had no idea what anything she was copying actually  _ meant.  _

Where a lab in her world might have a binder of protocols, Orochimaru’s lab had random sheets with sealing instructions shoved all over the place. A lot of them had no labels, and some of them were marked as vaguely as “37ºC” or “scar tissue.”

Apparently, if you wanted to edit all the genomic code related to bone growth, all you had to do was know the stroke order for the “ossification” seal and then stick it in the right part of your array. It was the most infuriating thing Tori had ever heard.

“What about epigenetic controls?” she asked. “What about loci with multiple targets?”

“What?” said Keizo. “This is too advanced for you. Haven’t you learned the cooling seal yet?”

The first proper seal Tori tried, after practicing drawing the components for days, was a seal that cooled things down to 4ºC. The version a ninja scientist would usually use had a second component to  _ keep _ their target at a four degrees, but she was starting simple. 

(There was another, completely different looking seal for warming a frozen thing up to 4ºC, which was the second most infuriating thing Tori had ever heard.)

Tori pricked her finger with a scalpel she borrowed from the surgical half of the lab and mixed several drops of blood in with her ink. She very carefully set up her array, and then added the command for cooling, and set a beaker of water in the “target” space of the array. 

She dropped a thermometer in the beaker. Nothing happened. 

She got new paper and tried again. And again. And again. She tried right through her lunch break.

Something like a mix of disappointment and panic formed in the back of Tori’s mind. She wanted to make the magic seal thing work because it was infuriating but also kind of awesome. She  _ needed _ it to work because if she couldn’t perform Orochimaru’s weird research tasks, then she wasn’t sure what would happen to her. 

“I don’t know, try more chakra,” Keizo said when she came to him in a panic. He shooed her away from where he was working on his own, stupidly complex seal. 

More chakra, Tori assumed, meant more blood. She pricked another finger and milked blood into her ink until her finger went all tingly and white. 

She drew out her seal extra carefully this time, holding her wrist with her left hand to keep it steady. When she placed the beaker with its thermometer in the seal, the thin line of mercury started to shrink. 

“Keizo!” she cried, leaning over her seal to watch the thermometer drop to exactly four degrees. “Keizo, I did it!”

The seal exploded. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I got some questions, here's an FAQ......
> 
> **When does this take place?**   
>  Tori guesses Sasuke's age to be fourteen or fifteen, so this takes place one to two years before the start of Shippuuden (time kept vague because the entire Naruto timeline is one big hand-wave). Akatsuki is going strong but they have some time before they start really getting involved in the plot. 
> 
> **Are Hidan and Kakuzu coming back?**  
>  YES. Tori will eventually interact with all Akatsuki members and the main plot will focus on them. I'm adding characters to the character list as I go, though, because I don't want anyone looking for Itachi or Sasori, for example, to click this and be disappointed when they haven't been introduced yet. 
> 
> Thank you for all your lovely comments so far. If you liked something you read, feel free to leave me one. :)


	4. tori continues to be miserable and so does the author

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tori’s face suffers greatly, a lot of people are lied to, and several plot-vital things happen while the author screams and bashes her head against a wall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This somehow turned into another giant chapter, and I am suffering for it. The **warning** for human experimentation is still in effect; it gets hit harder in this chapter (and Tori participates) and there’s some body horror/gore. Yup. Typical Orochimaru.

Setting off an explosion a foot away from your face was not something Tori recommended.

There was a sliver of a second between when she realized what was happening and when her world collapsed into pain. In that briefest of moments, Tori’s very eloquent last thought was: _Oh,_ **_fuck._ **

There was a lot of searing pain, a lot of confusion and muddy thoughts and some more pain, and then she she was in the dark weighed down by the pull of gravity on her own body, listening to muffled voices. A woman was talking, she thought, with occasional input from a man. She could hear them perfectly well, but her brain was having a hard time interpreting their words.

“I want to ask her something,” the man was saying.

“Why?” said the woman. “I talk to her all the time; she never says anything interesting…”

Were they talking about her? With massive effort, Tori opened her eyes. The light was bright and it took her a moment to adjust. Karin and Sasuke came into focus.

“Why‘re you here?” Tori croaked out.

She was in the infirmary, tucked into one of the cots in the back. She felt heavy and sluggish, but probably a lot better than she should feel, given… whatever had happened. Her memories were confused. She’d been working. Her face had been in mortal peril. With great effort, she reached up and patted her cheek. Her face was tender but still there. Excellent.

Karin’s stool was scooted right up next to Sasuke’s. She crossed her legs so that one foot slid against Sasuke’s leg and glared at Tori.

“Did you make fun of Kabuto’s data collection to Orochimaru-sama?” Karin said. “Idiot, you shouldn’t have done that. Orochimaru-sama loves teasing him.”

Tori had no idea what she was talking about. “What?”

“I’m supposed to observe you,” Sasuke said.

“What,” Tori repeated. What did Sasuke have to do with her? She hadn’t seen him since she arrived.

“You’re wasting Sasuke-kun’s time,” Karin sniffed. Then in a much sweeter voice, she said to Sasuke, “You should be resting your arm, Sasuke-kun.”

Sasuke’s arm was bandaged from his wrist upwards. He was holding a pen and clipboard. His eyes were red. Karin leaned over him and pointed to something on the clipboard.

It was too weird. Tori didn’t want to think about it. She pulled the scratchy infirmary blanket over her head and went back to sleep.

 

\--

 

Tori jerked awake to pressure on her face. A tingly sensation started at her temples and spread across her scalp. She tried to sit.

Kabuto pressed her back down, hands gentle but firm. “Calm down, I’m just doing a final assessment.”

Kabuto dubbed her fit to return to work. “Your skin will be sensitive for a few days, but that will fade with time. Unfortunately, I can’t regrow hair.”

Tori had a moment of panic– she’d spent years growing out her hair and was proud of it– but no, she obviously still had a full head of hair. There were some shorter strands around her face, singed off with weird ends that needed to be trimmed now, but nothing some creative layering couldn’t fix.

Not that she’d be able to consult a stylist in Oto.

“We can go now,” Karin said in the background, tugging at Sasuke’s good hand. “Let’s go raid the kitchen and–”

“I want to talk to her,” Sasuke repeated, and appeared behind Kabuto, eyes dark and intense.

“Ah, Sasuke-kun, thank you for helping with observation,” Kabuto said, easily avoiding what Sasuke had actually said. “Your notes are rather bare-bones, though…”

Tori sat up as Kabuto kept going on about… data collection. Sasuke had been using his sharingan to collect real-time, qualitative data on her. Sasuke didn’t look like he cared one bit if his notes were useful to Kabuto’s experiment or not.

Karin was right: that _was_ a massive waste of everyone’s time.

“Tell me if you need me again,” Sasuke said eventually, and left.

“You know if you need a sensor to monitor chakra, _I_ can do it,” Karin said snippily, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Ah,” Kabuto said, tilting his head and smiling politely at her. “Orochimaru-sama wants to keep him happy. Don’t you like running interference?”

Karin turned red, then muttered an excuse about something she needed to do. “Sasuke-kun, wait for me…!”

Tori was sent to lunch with the rest of her cohort of new recruits. Upon sitting down at their usual table, Haruka the samurai girl looked up and promptly burst into uncontrolled laughter. The rest of the new recruits joined suit.

“Trying to make a fashion statement, Onibaba?” Haruka asked through her tears of mirth.

During their after-lunch bathroom break, Tori looked in the mirror to discover her face bright pink and shiny, devoid of both eyebrows and eyelashes. It made her look alien and weird, two dark eyes peering out from a pink, featureless face.

“Oh no,” she gasped.

The girl at the sink next to her burst into a fit of mean giggles.

It was actually amazing that Tori could blow her face off one evening and then go back to work the next afternoon. Even if people in this world were all on the brink of dying from a measles outbreak, at least ninja magic bullshit medicine was effective.

(She hoped she _was_ carrying measles, and that everyone here in this terrible hellhole caught it and _died–_ )

Tori focused on how amazing medical ninjutsu was and tried not to think too much about murder or how much she desperately wanted to look up how long it took eyelashes to regrow. Ninja should hurry up and invent Google.

Keizo had left a note on her bench with a safe range of blood-to-ink ratios and a helpful note that said, “Don’t fuck up.”

Tori was hesitant to try the cooling seal again, for obvious reasons. The thawing seal– to bring frozen things up to 4ºC– was also simple, but seemed even more likely to explode since it was _adding_ energy into the system.

She pulled some old lab notebooks and flipped through them, trying to find another easy seal to practice.

There was a lot of weird shit in those notebooks. There was an entire book dedicated to experiments to keep organs alive once they’d been removed, complete with photos of people’s torsos pinned open, revealing all their precious internal organs decorated with ink. There was another notebook that was split between adding random organs into a person without their body rejecting it, and an experiment that had something to do with nature chakra that Tori didn’t really understand but than caused people’s limbs to fold in on themselves grotesquely and turned all the subjects a sickly gray. Some of the really old notebooks were all rushed, frantic notes on things like ‘chakra flow reversal’ and ‘cellular fusion.’

The pictures were horrifying. Tori stared at them in morbid fascination for several minutes, the way one might stare at old crime scene scene photos in a documentary.

Eventually, she found a series of experiments involving gene splicing, which seemed immediately applicable to her project, and she read through the pages very intently. While drawing up some seals to transfer genetic material sounded a lot simpler than real world science, whoever had made this notebook was having a lot of the same problems real world scientists might worry about. Genes were transferred to only a few cells; genes were spliced into the wrong part of the genome; subjects died or grew tumors and the researcher didn’t understand why.

There were pages and pages of photos and sketches of experiments gone wrong. This was why people in Tori’s world didn’t just skip ahead to human experimentation. Tori chewed on her bottom lip and with her finger traced a sketch of how the chambers of someone’s heart had collapsed under experimental conditions.

“That’s a nice face,” someone purred near her ear.

Tori screamed and nearly fell out of her chair.

Orochimaru straightened from leaning over her and laughed his soft, rasping laugh. On the other side of the lab, Keizo whipped to attention and hurried over to greet Orochimaru as Tori clutched at her chest. It was unclear if Orochimaru had been teasing her about her lack of eyebrows or her expression, but either way he’d scared her half to death.

“I brought you this,” Orochimaru said, and then set a jar down on her bench. It was filled with a bluish liquid and contained a human hand.

Well. Okay, then.

“Observe it while you practice your sealing,” Orochimaru said vaguely and then walked off with Keizo to talk shop.

Tori did not have any idea what sort of observations she might make about a disembodied hand, but she obediently set up a log sheet and then rolled out a new sheet of paper to practice the stupid cooling seal.

She listened to Orochimaru and Keizo’s conversation with half an ear while she mixed blood and ink in various ratios. Keizo had been working on a project to improve human regenerative processes.

Tori tried four more seals, the last one of which got down to ten degrees before her beaker started warminging back up to room temperature. Periodically, she’d been writing “no change” in her log sheet for the floating hand, but when she glanced over at it this time, it was gone.

“Umm,” she said.

Tori looked around nervously. Had she… lost the hand, somehow…? Where could it have gone?

The two men ignored her, fiddling around at their own benches.

“UMMM,” she tried again, louder this time.

They continued to ignore her. She wrote down “disappeared?” in the log and redrew her stupid seal. Just sticking something in the fridge or doing the work on ice was _much_ more efficient than this bullshit.

Orochimaru left a few hours later, picking up the jar and log sheet without even glancing at Tori or mentioning the missing hand. He’d left behind sheets and sheets of seals for Keizo, who was rushing around his side of the lab with calligraphy materials and flasks of clear liquids.

Tori was summoned for lunch, and when she came back Keizo shoved a plastic smock at her and told her to assist him.

There was a body on one of the surgical tables. It was thin and topless, with its face covered by a piece of sealing paper.

“I’m not really…” Tori started to say. She didn’t know what exactly she was protesting, but she was positive she couldn’t do it.

She held tools for Keizo as he peeled back the person’s skin and muscles poked around in the organs and then spent hours drawing complicated patterns in ink with a single-bristle brush. Tori focused on the person’s abdomen. She’d watched surgeries before, on TV and on youtube, and by guest lecturers who came into the pre-med club at university. This was fine. It was fine.

“Fuck,” Keizo said and tossed his brush across the lab.

The person had died.

 

\--

 

When Tori came into lab the next morning, Orochimaru was already there, dissecting the body. She very pointedly did not look in that direction as she set up her calligraphy kit and mixed ink.

She resisted for about an hour before she ended up boggling at Orochimaru and the body across the lab. He frowned and poked and prodded and every once in a while he pulled something out and handed it to Keizo to weigh.

Tori had cooled a beaker of 200mL water to four degrees three times in a row now, so she should probably try cooling something else, or adding the component of the seal to maintain temperature, or try the thawing seal…

Orochimaru sighed deeply and then looked her dead in the eyes.

Tori whipped back around, grabbing her brush. Seals. Yes. She was practicing that. Working hard, all day long.

To her horror, Orochimaru came over and asked how her progress was.

“Where did you get this ink?” he asked when she was done with her floundering explanation, picking up one of the ink sticks with his bare hands. The color rubbed off on the tips of his bone-white fingers.

“They were there when I got here,” she said immediately. This, at least, she knew the answer to.

“And you’ve been adding blood?” he asked, rolling the stick between his thumb and pointer finger.

“It’s what the book said to do,” she said slowly. It was more specifically what _Keizo_ had told her to do, but she wasn’t going to throw the trained assassin she worked alone with under the bus.

“This is already chakra infused,” he said, and dropped the stick carelessly onto her bench. “No wonder your seal exploded. You’re lucky it didn’t kill you.”

He said all this as if it were an amusing anecdote to tell to a child. Tori felt her jaw tense but kept her face carefully still.

“I’ve theorized people without elemental affinities have more stable chakra,” Orochimaru continued, casually leafing through Tori’s pile of saved seals. “Maybe we should use your blood for all our research.”

Tori could not tell if that was a threat or not.

“Do you really not use seals at all in your world?” he asked eventually, holding up one of her first attempts. It looked like a child had drawn it. “How do you get anything done?”

Orochimaru actually listened to what Tori had to say, and what she had to say was a rambling description of various laboratory techniques. She started awkwardly, halting and stammering and double-checking that he wasn’t getting annoyed or bored. He watched her intently, though, occasionally asking clarifying questions or prodding her ramble in a new direction, and Tori picked up speed and fluidity in her speech.

It felt so good to talk to someone who actually wanted to hear what she had to say, after weeks of being insulted and ignored. She thought that maybe she shouldn’t tell Orochimaru so much about her life, but what was he going to do with her shakey knowledge of Western blots? What was he going to do with a description of a DNA extraction kit?

The answer was, of course, that Orochimaru wandered to the back of the lab, grabbed a few chemicals, and attempted to replicate the DNA extraction kit she’d described.

“Here,” he called and waved Tori over. She approached cautiously, and as soon as she was within arms distance of him, Orochimaru reach over and ripped several hairs out of her head.

“Ow,” Tori yelped.

“Tissue sample,” Orochimaru said vaguely and then picked up a pipet.

Tori didn’t see why he had to test it on _her_ when he had his own head of perfectly good hair, which he obviously washed with actual shampoo and conditioner, not the shampoo-soap combination gel she was using. Between that and burning some of it off, Tori’s hair could use a break, thank you very much.

It took very little prompting to get Orochimaru to explain the “classical” ninja technique of DNA extraction. Basically, you chemically cleaned your sample of impurities, and then tossed it onto a seal. You could even configure the seal to pull certain genes of interest without knowing anything about the genomic sequence.

“How convenient,” Tori said blandly, by which she meant, _That’s the most infuriating thing I’ve ever heard._ “How do people who aren’t ninja do science?”

“Monks have some knowledge of chakra,” Orochimaru answered, free-hand pouring ethanol into his test tube like some sort of maniac. That still didn’t explain how anyone who couldn’t make fancy ninja seals got anything done, unless all medical and scientific research was done by ninja and monks.

“What about, you know, scholars…?” Tori tried, watching Orochimaru slowly swirl his tube.

“Fascinating,” Orochimaru breathed out as a white precipitate formed in his tube, completely ignoring her question. “You said you knew how to purify this?”

“Um–” said Tori, before she was left alone to figure out if the lab even had the reagents to do the next steps.

Tori couldn’t believe she had been summoned to another dimension to do a phenol-chloroform DNA purification. She couldn’t believe Orochimaru had reversed engineered DNA extraction from tissue in less than an hour and then _gotten it on the first try._ What the _hell._

The chemical storeroom was a large closet around the corner from her bench, and after a long search, Tori was dismayed to realized she’d have to make phenol-chloroform herself. While she’s done the purification enough times that she wouldn’t have to consult a protocol, her lab had always had the reagents already made.

Tori supposed that if Orochimaru could make up scientific protocols on the spot, so could she.

When she came out of the storeroom with a glass bottle in each hand, Kabuto was in the lab anesthetizing a patient. Two random people were already passed out on surgical tables, while Orochimaru was examining a very conscious and very nervous cafeteria worker. The woman was shaking so hard Tori could see her trembling from across the lab.

There were only three surgical tables. That woman was going to have to watch whatever the hell they were doing.

Tori focused on her work. Phenol was a really dangerous chemical, after all. What was she supposed to neutralize it if she spilled it, again? Was it glycerol? She should go find glycerol, for safety reasons. She ducked back into the storeroom.

The lab had a hand-crank centrifuge, which was the most absurd piece of lab equipment Tori had ever seen. She thought very hard about how ridiculous it was to have to manually spin down the samples herself. She thought very hard about how ridiculous she must look, this tiny civilian girl with no eyebrows cranking the silly machine as hard as she could. She thought very hard indeed, lest she get distracted thinking about how Orochimaru and Kabuto were literally pulling out organs just a few yards away.

It was all very stressful.

The surgeries did not take very long. By the time Tori had purified the DNA and moved it into ethanol to precipitate again, Orochimaru had left the people in the care of his minions and was washing his hands in the lab sink.

“I’m supposed to leave this at minus 80 degrees,” Tori said, and Orochimaru blinked down at her like he’d forgotten she was there.

“I’ve never cooled something by that much,” he said, drying his hands. He hadn’t used gloves. “So many new challenges today, Tori.”

He sounded pleased. He very casually drew up a beautiful seal and set Tori’s capped tube of DNA in it. Ice crystals formed immediately on it as it chilled.

“Wonderful,” he said dryly. “I want to show you something.”

They’d harvested spleens from three civilian workers and one ninja. Orochimaru drew another gorgeous seal around one of his recently procured organs.

“You’re going to help me resurrect a bloodline limit,” he purred.

The spleens were to screen splicing techniques. You didn’t need a spleen to live, after all, and they were nice, big organs with a generous blood supply– a perfect prelude to a full-body test. All the spleens Tori had dissected had been failed to attempts to splice in a lost bloodline limit.

Kimimaro’s bloodline limit, specifically, Tori realized with a jolt. Orochimaru showed her where he kept tube after tube of DNA marked _Kaguya Clan._ One didn’t just _die_ in Oto, it seemed.

Orochimaru helpfully narrated what he was doing for her. This is was a stasis seal to keep the organ alive. This component of the seal isolated DNA from the donor; this one fused it into the new host. He had a book of notes on different variables she could try.

The fusion process itself was marked with a dim glow of blue chakra, and then Orochimaru left Tori to process the spleen. This one was filled with thin, splintering pieces of bone that followed the branching patterns of the blood vessels. It was oddly beautiful.

When she was cleaning up, Snarly-nin appeared to take her to dinner. She’d missed lunch entirely.

The cafeteria staff was down by one and jumpy. One of the woman visibly flinched when a kunoichi in a flak jacket snapped at her for a larger portion of meat.

Tori’s cohort was talking about bananas again, and then how one of the boys had been promoted after a week-long mission in Water Country, where he’d probably had access to said bananas. Now he was allowed to take meals and showers whenever he wanted and travel the base unaccompanied.

“It’s not fair,” Haruka whined. “I’ve taken on all sorts of missing nin. Why don’t _I_ get any missions?”

“Fighting a librarian doesn’t count, even if they are rogue ninja,” someone sneered back. “You can’t even use chakra, right?”

Haruka responded by grabbing the kid by the back of his head and slamming his face into the table. Tori moved down a few seats to the end of the table. And she’d thought public school was bad.

 

\--

 

The following weeks were the most productive of Tori’s life. In Oto, you worked all day every day, and you worked hard. She worked her way through all the basic lab seals she could find, managed to assist Keizo in his surgeries without having a nervous breakdown, and kept logs on the disembodied hand.

She grew in at _least_ six eyelashes.

One day Kabuto came in and gave her a disembodied foot instead, and Tori realized where the body parts were coming from.

“It’s the Hozuki boy, isn’t it?” she said, staring at the foot. “He turns to water, right?”

“So you can recognize him by his foot and not his hand?” Kabuto asked. “Interesting.”

Tori’s lips thinned. Had they actually wanted her to watch the hand or did they just want to see if her made-up future vision could get anything off a single hand?

She didn’t like that. She couldn’t fake results if she didn’t know tests were happening.

“You need more than half the body for Future Sight to work properly,” she said, turning back to the note Orochimaru had left behind about adjustments to the day’s experiment. He was very good at explaining things in person but his notes were… less cohesive. “It’s just that– who else could it be?”

“Hmm,” Kabuto said noncommitly, and left.  

One morning Karin woke her before lights on and dragged her down to the infirmary in her pajamas. Sasuke was sitting on the examination table, wincing slightly as Kabuto poked at his side with healing chakra.

“Good morning, Karin, Tori-chan,” Kabuto said, leaning back from his work. “Sasuke has some free time, so I thought we’d try another experiment.”

“Free time?” Karin scoffed. “He has two cracked ribs–”

The argument was short. Orochimaru had given his blessing, so they were doing this. Sasuke watched them passively while Tori shifted nervously from one foot to another.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t plan for this,” Kabuto said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “Why don’t we try physical stress. Tori-chan, do some jumping jacks.”

Tori looked from Kabuto back to Sasuke. Sasuke’s eyes were red, which meant sharingan, which meant he was going to have the sight of her making a fool of herself seared into his brain forever. He already had her scraggly partial eyebrows permanently recorded in there.

Karin hovered behind Sasuke. She raised her own, beautifully sculpted eyebrows at Tori expectantly.

Tori did not want to do jumping jacks. It was dangerous to refuse orders, but also it was very early and Tori was not a morning person. So instead of just doing them, she blinked at Kabuto again and asked:

“What’s a jumping jack?”

They stared at her.

“You don’t know what a jumping jack is?” Sasuke asked, genuinely baffled.

“Maybe it’s a terminology difference between our worlds,” Tori suggested with a shrug.

Kabuto gritted his teeth. “Jump, but open your legs and raise your arms above your head.”

She jumped, landing with her left leg forward and her right one behind her. She raised her arms straight above her head. Karin had to physically turn around to hide whatever face she made.

“I think we call this a ‘sun salutation,’” Tori said brightly.

Kabuto looked furious for about half a second. “Sasuke-kun, demonstrate for Tori-chan.”

“Absolutely not.”

They decided to try and see how genjutsu affected her future vision instead, and Tori sat across from Sasuke, staring intently into his eyes.

“Use your ability,” Sasuke said.

“Um,” Tori said. “In a few years, you’re going to get into a fight with a missing-nin from Iwa named Deidara.”

“Never heard of them,” Kabuto said from behind Tori.

“Really?” Tori said, keeping eye contact with Sasuke. She’d never been in a genjutsu before, and she was curious to see what it would be like. “He’s pretty good. It’s a tough fight for you, Sasuke.”

Sasuke didn’t say anything. Tori continued narrating the fight.

“...and he claims he’s trained one eye to be immune to genjutsu, since he has a grudge against your brother–”

Sasuke tensed and sat up straight. Tori had to turn her face to maintain eye contact.

“Does he know where Itachi is?” Sasuke asked. “I would ask him where–”

“Sasuke-kun, you’re ruining the experiment,” Karin whined loudly, interrupting him. “Tori, why don’t you skip ahead to how Sasuke wins?”

Sasuke gave Karin an annoyed look. “The genjutsu hasn’t affected her ability at all. She hasn’t even noticed.”

“What?” Tori said, jumping slightly. He’d already started it? She looked around the lab. Nothing seemed out of place. Sasuke and her were still sitting, Karin leaning casually against the bench next to Sasuke chair. Kabuto was watching them with hands on hips, and Keizo was ignoring him while he–

They weren’t in the lab. They were in the infirmary. Tori hadn’t even noticed. _Huh._

Yep, didn’t like that.

Karin sat in Sasuke’s lap and pushed his hair back. The lab melted away and back into the infirmary as Sasuke shoved her off and stood.

“This is useless,” Sasuke declared. “I’m going back to my room.”

He left.

“Look what you did,” Karin accused, before running after him. It was unclear if she blamed Kabuto or Tori for… whatever that was.  

Later that day, Karin found her again while she was following a line of new recruits to dinner. She pulled her out of line and into a narrow corridor that lead to parts of the hideout Tori had never visited.

“Here,” Karin said, and shoved a handful of small plastic items into Tori’s hands. “Fix your face. Sasuke keeps staring at it.”

She’d given her make-up. It was all obviously used– two tubes of nearly empty lip gloss, powder foundation with a hole all the way through the back of the container, and two pencil eyeliners that had been sharpened down nubs.

“You look ridiculous and I’m sick of looking your dumb face,” Karin continued, pointedly not looking Tori in the eyes.

“Thank you?” Tori said. It was– well, it was weirdly thoughtful. Her skin wasn’t pink anymore and didn’t match the foundation anyway, but she could definitely use the eyeliner, at least, to draw in the rest of eyebrows and highlight her eyes in place of her eyelashes (which she now had a full ten of, thank you very much).

“Shut up,” Karin snapped, making it easier for Tori to squash the sudden sense of endearment she had for Karin. “I’m transferring soon, so I have to get rid of old stuff anyway.”

Karin turned to go, but Tori hadn’t completely managed not to be charmed by the gift, so she said, “Hey, um… I’m not allowed to be alone with Sasuke, right? That’s why you’re always there, right?”

Or at least, she wasn’t allowed to talk to him about certain things without someone to intervene. The ‘certain things’ definitely included ‘how to murder your brother,’ judging by their last conversation.

Karin turned, giving her a weary look and neither confirming nor denying Tori’s theory. Tori kept going. “So, I mean, next time, if I just left… you’d be alone with Sasuke, right?”

The corners of Karin’s lips twitched into something resembling a smile. “I’m not supposed to let you go anywhere alone.”

“You’re not supposed to give me things either,” Tori replied.

“Ah, that’s true,” Karin said, then made a big show of rolling her eyes and sighing deeply. “I guess it can’t be helped, then. Don’t get caught with that,” she added, sharply, then waltzed off.

Tori shoved her her new possessions into her bra and hurried to catch up with the other new recruits.

 

\--

 

In the bathroom after dinner, when they were allowed extra time to shower, Tori drew on eyebrows. The second one ended up longer and thicker than the first. They made her look like one of the ugly stepsisters from a Cinderella movie.

She attempted to even them out, then got entirely distracted and elongated one eyebrow into a swirl across her temple and burst into giggles.

“What are you doing?” one of the girls asked.

It was a new girl, who was nine years old. Recruiting a nine year to live like this and go out to be a human weapon was disgusting, but the look of pure derision on such a tiny girl’s face was hilarious. Tori laughed so hard she had to grip the sides of the sink to stay upright.

“Weirdo,” the girl muttered.

“What did you do to your face?” Snarly-nin asked immediately when Tori walked out.

Between peels of laughter, Tori had tried to wash off her make-up experiment, but shinobi make-up proved to be impressively waterproof. She’d only succeeded in smudging it slightly and making her forehead red from rubbing.

“Um,” Tori replied. “Lab accident.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Snarly-nin asked, towering over her.

“There’s lots of ink in the lab,” Tori said, taking a step back. “You can ask Orochimaru-sama. He was there.”

“Ink…” Snarly-nin started to argue, but she scooted around him to follow the rest of her cohort down the hall to the cells, and he didn’t stop her.

Snarly-nin didn’t ask Orochimaru, of course, because annoying Orochimaru was a great way to get yourself tapped to be an experimental subject. Other ways to get tapped were to do things like injure yourself too badly on a mission, or question orders, or be one of the civilian workers.

Tori knew this because she’d been graduated to performing actual experiments, and Orochimaru liked to comment on why they chose certain people for the procedures. It wasn’t exactly a scientifically sound way of choosing test subjects, but Tori certainly wasn’t going to say anything.

“Poor boy,” Orochimaru said as Keizo cut into the teenaged shinobi they were operating on today. He sounded deceptively sympathetic.

The boy had come back from his mission missing part of his leg, and Orochimaru had very reassuringly told him they were working on a new surgery that could regrow limbs, not mentioning that every patient so far had died on the table. The boy had agreed enthusiastically.

One of Tori’s duties in lab now was to mix ink, and she held it for Orochimaru as he carefully painted seals across the boy’s skin and organs. She watched him work, focusing on the paintbrushes instead of the very human shape on the table. She recognized some of the components: stability, stasis, fusion, more stability. When Keizo did these on his own, he’d consult notes; Orochimaru did it all free-hand.

Keizo also used ink Tori had mixed blood into as a chakra source, since feeding a steady flow of your own chakra into the ink as you painted for that long was apparently difficult, even for a former Special Jounin. Orochimaru had never once asked.

An hour and a half into the procedure, Orochimaru stood back and dropped his brush onto the tray Tori was holding out for him.

“Disappointing,” he said blandly. The boy’s insides were growing tumors at an alarming rate, blooming from his insides and making his torso bloat. It was a problem they’d been having a lot now. “Tori, tell me you have something good to show me.”

Orochimaru did not look particularly intimidating– he was very pale, and delicately pretty, and not all that tall– but when he leaned into her space, Tori felt her insides turn cold and she practically ran to her own bench.

“It’s consistent now,” she said, leafing through pages of her lab notebook. Spleens weren’t supposed to grow bone at all, and hers still did, but now the bone came in a consistent shape and mass. If she could splice in Kaguya clan genes and they didn’t cause the cells to freak out and start osteogenesis, then that would mean…

Well, that could mean she’d just spliced them in wrong, but it could also mean she did it _right_ and they could try splicing things into a _whole person_ without them spontaneously growing an extra skeleton. It would also theoretically have implications for almost all of Orochimaru’s gene editing experiments. “Theoretically” was the key word there, because both gene editing and fuuinjutsu were both weird and finicky and apt to just not work for no obvious reason.

Tori would know. She was rapidly on her way to becoming semi-competent in both.

Consistency wasn’t that much of an improvement, though, and the side of Orochimaru’s lips tugged down, and Tori heard her own breath hitch.

“You’re splicing the right gene in, at least,” he allowed after a few moments of frowning minutely at her notes. “We don’t even know what Keizo is splicing.”

On the other side of the lab, Keizo’s shoulders tensed conspicuously, but he kept working. He was processing the body– dissecting and analyzing it before disposal. This was an unpleasant task he had attempted to teach to Tori, which she had gotten out of neatly by feigning a panic attack.

(Kabuto had seen her have lots of weird drug-induced breakdowns. It seemed in-character.)

“We could try validating some of these,” Orochimaru said, sounding slightly more interested in the experiment. “I don’t think Chikako is doing very much.”

In Tori’s world, she thought that the first step in “validating” a gene splicing experiment would be some very mundane and routine laboratory techniques like PCR or a Western blot. When she’d brought it up to him, Orochimaru seemed to think this notion was cute. In Oto, they were just going to try and a full-body splicing experiment and see what happened.

Watanabe Chikako was a spleen donor, and Tori had gotten not-horrible results with her spleen, which was enough to pass the dubious screen test. Orochimaru supervised her drawing out a huge seal across the butcher paper on the operating table, then laughed at her efforts and made her redo it five more times.

The actual surgery required more seals, drawn directly on the skin, since humans came with annoying things like their own chakra systems and metabolic reactions and other things to mess up seals. After Chikako had been brought in and sedated, Tori took notes while Orochimaru walked her through the procedure.

Tori didn’t see why she had to practice on a person and couldn’t try, you know, a pig or a monkey a few times just to make sure she wasn’t about to accidentally kill someone.

“Why would you waste time on an animal?” Orochimaru asked when she said as much to him.

“It’s the same four nucleotides,” Tori answered. “And animals have more children and grow up faster than humans. It’s just practical.”

She wasn’t going to try arguing _ethics_ with anyone here. Pragmatism, though, turned out to be a losing argument too, as Orochimaru pointed out that humans could do useful work while they weren’t being experimented on.

“After all, look at you,” he said. Tori dropped the subject.

On the bright side, the sealing array Tori drew successfully spliced Kaguya clan genes into Chikako. Unfortunately, the woman spasmed, grew extra bones that burst through her skin, and died, leaving behind a body that looked more like a bloody collapsed tent than a human.

Tori did not vomit. She did, however, suddenly find herself unable to breathe and clutching at the nearest lab bench for support.

“That’s going to take a while to process,” Orochimaru said dryly. He didn’t sound upset, which was good. “I’m interested to see what degree of penetrance we got.”

He did, however, sound mildly excited, which might turn out to be worse.

“Maybe you can get Tori help you with processing this time,” Orochimaru continued, and Keizo threw her a dirty look.

Orochimaru wished her good luck on the way out and patted her shoulder. Tori’s knees wobbled.

Keizo fetched them some buckets to sort the woman’s dissected parts into.

 

\--

 

Tori was really and truly freaked out about the idea of mangling a person’s body with magic ninja gene editing and then playing butcher with the body. She had, however, gotten very good at panicking with a perfectly serene face, and so weeping and crying and hiding in a corner to get out of specimen processing involved a lot of acting.

It had worked when Keizo was just chopping out tumors from his own experiments. No one wanted to have to deal with a gross-faced crying woman, after all. It worked less well when the test subjects were for her own experiment. On body number four, Keizo dragged her back from the chemical storeroom and told her she’d have to work _or else._

The _or else_ was never made explicitly clear to Tori, but she knew other civilians did laundry and cleaned for them with pieces of their bodies missing or added, so she insisted Keizo walk her through it while she took notes for bodies five through seven.

“That’s very cute of you,” Kabuto said when he nosily flipped through her notes. Orochimaru had mysteriously disappeared for the week and sent Kabuto to check in. “If you’re not going to work, find something useful to do.”

The _or else_ was unspoken.

Tori did not want to learn how to use a bone saw on a formerly human nightmare-inducing mass. She pulled out old books and notes on fuuinjutsu to practice. There was a lot she could possibly be learning; seals were incredibly versatile. She’d never be a master, of course, because that required precise chakra control and she could only add blood, but…

But she could definitely do something useful to make up for ignoring all the people screaming and dying and then getting thrown in the trash.

She decided to fix up the hand-crank centrifuge. It was basically a wheel one could load test tubes in, clamped to a bench. She couldn’t build an automatic one like they had in her world, obviously, but she had found a lot of motion-related seals and figured she could try making a seal that made the centrifuge crank itself. It would save her from sore arms, everyone else from having to stand at the centrifuge when they could be doing other things, and it would allow for standardized speeds.

The motion seals were mostly meant for setting traps, but every handbook on fuuinjutsu she’d gone through had a very long introduction about how fuuinjutsu was the most adaptable of the ninja arts.

Tori spent a few days designing the seal around her own specimen processing. There was a drawer at her bench filled with sticky tags, and when she was ready, she copied her first original seal onto a tag and slapped it onto the centrifuge.

The seal had what was called a ‘trip-wire’ component, which meant it activated with applied force, such as an enemy walking across it. In this case, all Tori had to do was grab the centrifuge crank handle and push.

She did, and the centrifuge spun right off its clamp, flew across the room, and smashed into the shelves of glass labware with a terrible nose.

“What the FUCK,” Keizo screamed. The centrifuge continued spinning, digging further into the shelves and broken beakers and flasks, spitting out ground up glass and splinters.

Keizo stared at it in fury for a few moments. Tori attempted to think of an explanation and failed. Keizo reached forward to grab the centrifuge wheel, but released it immediately. Not even a ninja was going to stop that with their bare hands.

Tori opened her mouth to suggest he try snatching the tag off. She got as for as “you could try–” before he backhanded her across the face with enough force to knock her over.

“Idiot,” he growled at her.

Tori rubbed her face. It hurt, but she was more surprised than scared. Then Keizo grabbed her by the hair, lifted her up, and backhanded her again.

He shook her a few times, screaming at her that she was lazy and useless and stupid, until she broke down into tears. He dropped her then, and stomped out of the lab.

Tori took a few shaking breathes to steady herself. Keizo was almost definitely going to report her to some sort authority– like Kabuto or Orochimaru– and they were both capable of doing worse things to her than slapping her in the face. _Now_ she was scared.

“It was an experiment to improve lab efficiency,” she practiced reciting to a spider that lived on the corner of her bench. “My intentions were to improve work for Orochimaru-sama. I apologize. It will never happen again.”

The spider just sat there. She practiced the speech again.

When Keizo came back, Orochimaru was behind him, and the centrifuge wheel was still grinding away at the wall. Orochimaru took one look at it and burst into laughter.

Keizo’s face went from vindictively smug to unsure. “Orochimaru-sama, she’s barely helped me at all, and now she’s broken–”

“You assured me you didn’t need assistance with this project,” Orochimaru said, an amused smile across his face. That probably meant he was in a good mood.

Keizo squirmed visibly. “She’s disrespectful to our work, Orochimaru-sama,” Keizo said finally. “In Water Country, a girl like that would be thrown out. In Kiri a civilian that insubordinate would be killed–”

“I forget, Keizo,” Orochimaru interrupted. “Are we in Water Country?”

“No, Orochimaru-sama.”

“Then get back to work. Tori,” Tori straightened to attention as Orochimaru turned to her. Her face stung. “Why don’t you watch that until it stops? Then you can go visit Kabuto about your face.”

He patted her shoulder on the way out. It was almost reassuring, except that until about three minutes ago she’d been convinced she was going to be vivisected as punishment.

Tori had set the tag for twenty minutes, but she must have made a mistake in the the timing component, because it just spun and spun until it used up the chakra feeding it. The seal she’d based it on was designed to be extremely chakra efficient, and the wheel didn’t stop spinning and fall onto its side until after midnight. She missed all her meals and had to wait until morning to have Kabuto fix the swelling of her face.

 

\--

 

“How can you have improved your calligraphy this much but you still can’t draw eyebrows evenly?” Orochimaru teased, days later.

It was deeply unfortunate how much Tori liked Orochimaru. He frightened her to her very core, and she knew it was dumb to seek out his attention, but he was the only person in the entire stupid underground village who even pretended to care about a single thing she said.

He nodded along with her when she explained her dumb undergraduate biology project. He asked questions about her personal life back in her own world, let her talk about how her favorite biological phenomena, and answered almost any question she asked about science and culture in this world. He had a very insulted-looking Keizo find her a book on the history of cultivars in the Elemental Nations. He once allowed her to ramble for a half hour about the Jurassic Park series while he prepared tissue samples from their latest failed experiment.

Tori didn’t even _like_ Jurassic Park. But Orochimaru seemed to find the story amusing, so she powered through it, and even told him about how she’d secretly watched it as a child, hidden under the dining table while her parents watched it one room over, terrified by it but too fascinated to look away.

“You have dinosaurs in your ancient history too, right?” she said. “Sasuke had a toy one when he was a kid.”

“Yes,” Orochimaru said, then paused to look at her. “How could you possibly know that about Sasuke-kun?”

_Mistake,_ Tori thought, silently panicking. Sasuke’s childhood wasn’t a vision of the future.

“He’s going to tell Karin once,” Tori said vaguely. “And then she’s not going to let that go because it’s adorable. What’s paleontology like here?”

“It’s more of a civilian science,” Orochimaru said, which meant that he wasn’t particularly interested in it. “The fact that DNA lasts that long… that’s interesting.”

The conversations she had with him weren’t even that great, all things considered, but they were definitely better than every conversation she had with everyone else in Oto. Which meant that when Orochimaru suddenly disappeared for several weeks, she suddenly felt lonely.

That was bad. That was really, truly bad, because trying to fill her need for human interaction with Orochimaru was the worst idea she’d ever had. She needed to make a friend.

She only really saw people who weren’t related to the lab in the cafeteria. The new recruits were all served their shitty food together, and then they usually spread out over the same table. They weren’t really sitting together so much as away from scarier, more experienced ninja.

The people in her cohort were all horrendously _young_ , so Tori’s initial reaction was to try and talk to someone else. She picked a girl who looked only a few years younger than her, who had weird yellow spikes coming from her elbows but a nice face.

“Hi, I’m Tori,” Tori said, putting her tray down in front of the girl.

“Fuck off,” the girl answered.

“Okay,” said Tori amiably, picking up her tray and going back over to the new recruit table.

Her subsequent tries had similar results, and one boy even made a half-hearted attempt to stab her with a butter knife.

“You’re not going to get anyone to talk to you until you get promoted,” Haruka sniffed at her after she’d escaped back to their table. “And _you’re_ not going to get promoted because you’re not a ninja.”

“Neither are you,” Tori muttered, poking at the dish of what was either rice with old shrimp or small brown pebbles with large pink rocks.

“ _Excuse me?_ ” Haruka hissed.

“Um,” said Tori, immediately backtracking. “I mean– um– we’re similar, you know?”

Haruka continued to look offended, and Tori remembered her striking down another recruit with her naginata. Tori continued to ramble.

“Like, I mean, we’re not ninja, so we have to work a little harder for promotion–”

Everyone else in their initial cohort had been promoted by now. Which meant they got to pick their bathroom times and get fresh fruit and vegetables and not hide their make-up in a drawer in the lab.

“Work _harder?_ ” Haruka yelled. All the other recruits were watching in silence, excitement in their eyes. “You think I’m not working hard? I’ve taken tons of very important internal missions!”

“We both–” Tori started.

Haruka threw herself across the table, just as fast as a shinobi, and slammed Tori into the floor. The naginata came down, slicing through the side of Tori’s neck and piercing the floor.

“Don’t you ever compare me to you, Onibaba,” Haruka hissed, kneeling painfully on Tori’s stomach as she bore down on her with the blade. “I’ve killed _three_ traitors in the village for Orochimaru-sama already. I am a warrior, and you are just a pathetic, civilian old _hag_.”

_Really, I’m_ **_nineteen_ ** _,_ Tori thought distantly even as she panicked. What could she say to Haruka to make her get off? What did she like? Bananas? Should Tori talk about bananas?

The other recruits were jeering at them. No, talking about bananas was a dumb idea. Instead, Tori just laid there pathetically until Haruka spit on her and got off.

“Don’t sit with us anymore, Onibaba,” Haruka commanded, and went back to her lunch.

Tori shakily stood and grabbed a napkin off the table and held it to her neck. Since she could still breathe and her jaw hadn’t gone slack, Tori assumed Haruka hadn’t hit anything important, but she was bleeding profusely.

“Where are you going?” Snarly-nin asked as she approached the door.

“To the infirmary?” Tori tried.

“Clinic visits are only permitted after training sessions and missions, or in the case of disease,” Snarly-Nin sneered.

“But–”

“Sit.”

Tori cleaned the wound diligently when they were allowed the use the bathroom, then fashioned herself a bandage out of some toilet paper and a tampon. Haruka glared at her the entire time.

In the morning she lied to Snarly-nin about helping Kabuto with an experiment and went to the infirmary instead of breakfast. Kabuto clicked his tongue at her and informed her it was infected.

“You should have come to me right away,” he said. “Now it’s going to scar.”

Tori nearly screamed. In the lab, she said to the spider that lived on her bench, “This place is going to drive me insane.”

“Hey,” Keizo snapped. “Who are you talking to?”

“No one,” Tori replied, and opened her lab notebook. To the spider, she whispered, “He’s just upset Orochimaru likes me better.”

“Hey,” Keizo repeated, stomping across the lab to her bench. “We’re doing another osteogenesis experiment today, and you’re actually going to do the post-op yourself this time.”

Then he looked at the spider on her bench, grunted, and squished it with his thumb.

Something inside of Tori snapped. Rage flooded through her body. She was fed up with this place, she was fed up with Haruka, she was fed up with Snarly-nin, she was fed up with Kabuto, and she was _really_ fed up with Keizo.

“Of course,” she said with a sweet smile, and did her usual pre-op work. Orochimaru made an appearance for the first time in weeks, and the surgeries went about as well as they usually did.

When all three bodies inevitably had bones erupt form their skin and die, Tori said to Orochimaru, “Maybe we need a better screening method. Don’t you think the chances of success might be higher with people more genetically related to the Kaguya clan?”

Orochimaru tilted his head back in interest. “And how would you suggest determining that?”

“Hmm, I wouldn’t really know how to set up a genetic test like that here…” Tori said, drumming her fingers on the edge of the surgical table. “But, I suppose, people from the same country are bound to be more similar, right?”

A suggestion like that wouldn’t have worked in Tori’s home country, where people descended from populations all over the world. Here, though, it was a credible idea. Orochimaru thought on it a few days, and then sent word via Kabuto to preferentially take the spleens of people from Water Country.

Tori felt bad, but then the screening process did go better, so she didn’t feel _that_ bad.

Orochimaru did not check in in person again for another week, when they’d removed twelve Water Country spleens and Tori had spliced Kaguya genes into about half of them.

“They look _a lot_ better,” Tori said as Orochimaru flipped through her lab notebook.

“I’m glad you’re enthusiastic about this,” Orochimaru said mildly. “How confident are you?”

“Very,” Tori said. “Although the sample size is a bit small. How has Keizo’s project been going?”

Orochimaru laughed softly. “So you have a little meanness in you after all.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tori said as innocently as she could.

“You’re not very subtle,” Orochimaru said, then patted her shoulder and called Keizo over.

Keizo was a former Kiri nin.

They removed his spleen.

 

\--

 

Keizo disappeared for two weeks while in recovery. Orochimaru also disappeared, and Tori was left alone in the lab. They were the best two weeks of her time in Oto.

She went through the spleens, of course, and earmarked people for the full-body experiment. Keizo’s spleen barely had any bone in it at all after treatment, and Tori added a little note next to his name about how she wasn’t _sure_ since he was _so helpful in lab._ She ended it with a smiley face.

She passed the note to Karin, who showed up daily to make sure Tori was actually working.

“I’m sure Orochimaru-sama will be pleased,” Karin drawled, folding the note up and pocketing it.

“Where is he?” Tori asked conversationally.

“According to Kabuto, he’s ‘indisposed,’” Karin said boredly. “Which means he’s ill again, if your moronic self hasn’t picked up the lingo yet. Convenient for me, though, since they pushed my transfer to the Southern hideout back a week.”

“You’re chatty today,” Tori observed, grinning. “Friendly, almost.”

“Of course I am,” Karin said, popping a hip and crossing her arms. “Sasuke just got back from a mission and I want you to come up with an experiment you need him for.”

Tori decided that Sasuke should come see what chakra looked like in a disembodied spleen, and Karin went to fetch him. Sasuke took one look at the spleen and informed Tori she was an idiot.

“Wow,” Tori replied. “I am so offended and outraged. I have to go walk it off.”

Then she walked out of the lab while Karin grabbed for Sasuke’s arm, and Tori found herself free to roam Oto by herself for the first time. She wandered for several hours, power walking to look like she knew where she was going whenever she passed other people.

A lot of hallways were blocked off and required a key. They were mostly residential, she remembered from the brief tour she’d gotten when she’d been working inventory. She found locker rooms and training areas, refound the laundry facilities, discovered a kitchen where they seemed to be making actual good food, and then found a room full of organs.

It was some sort of storage room for human organs, which of course Oto had. They were all floating in jars of blue liquid, dimly illuminated in a dark room like the world’s most morbid aquarium. There were rows and rows of them, organized by organ system.

It was quiet and dark and oddly peaceful. Tori moved through them slowly, examining them one by one. They were all carefully labelled, mostly in Orochimaru’s handwriting and a few in Kabuto’s, with dates and donor name and any notes of interest. Most of them were from people with bloodline limits, but some were from interesting sounding experiments.

One side of the room had some tables with lab equipment, and then one huge tank filled with liquid. Tori wandered over there, hoping to find a pen and paper to write down some of the experiment names and dates she wanted to look up later. She ignored the big tank, since it appeared to be empty.

When she finally produced a pencil and some scratch paper, there was a loud bang behind her and she squeaked and whirled around. A naked boy was floating in the tank.

“S–Suigetsu?!” Tori cried.

“Who are you?” Suigetsu asked, his voice muffled by the glass, but not as garbled by the water as she would expect.

“Doesn’t matter,” Tori said. She was trying very hard not to look at his lower region, but she did note he had both hands. “Can you just cut your body parts off and stick them back on?” she asked without thinking.

“Oh, you’re the _lab girl,_ ” Suigetsu groaned. “Are you going to be taking over from that glasses guy? Please say yes. He’s boring. And terrible.”

“Sorry,” Tori said. Suigetsu groaned again and then continued to complain about Kabuto’s bedside manner, and Tori wandered away.

There were too many organs to read all of the labels before she had to leave, so she stuck to the longer captions. Some of them where interesting stories about how the specimens were found, and some of them were descriptions of experiments that she jotted down. She mostly ignored the donor names (although there was a set of gills marked _Hoshigaki_ ), until she reached the hearts and found her own name.

She stared at it. In Orochimaru’s neat print, it had the date of about a month ago, and then:

 

Tori Mendoza.  
_Organ cloned from DNA isolated by novel technique described by donor.  
_ _Surprising clonal stability. Lack of elemental alignment preventing typical interference between endogenous and exogenous chakra? Or artefact of donor’s otherworldly origin?_ Further testing needed.

 

What the **fuck.**

“Hey, Suigetsu,” Tori yelled, cutting him off in the middling of the whining session she had absolutely not been paying attention to. “What _is_ this place?”

“How do you not know?” Suigetsu said, squinting down at her. “It’s Orochimaru’s private lab.”

Tori went back to her regular work in a daze. When Karin showed up to demand more alone time with Sasuke, Tori asked her about the private lab and Karin’s eyebrows shot up.

“How did you– I guess he keyed you in to his privacy seals since you’re lab personnel. I would not spend a lot of time in there, Tori.”

Tori, of course, went back as soon as Karin let her go so she could bother Sasuke. She went through the lab notes Orochimaru had over there, pulling the one on her cloned heart. Whole organ cloning was a technique he’d had around for a while, it seemed, but it didn’t have a great success rate.

Except he had perfect clones of her heart, spleen, and pancreas, and he had outlined ideas for further testing, and he _hadn’t even mentioned it to her_.

Then Suigetsu sneezed and Tori remembered she wasn’t supposed to be there and left.

Karin came to her a third time and sighed wistfully about leaving that night. They faked another stupid experiment for Sasuke, and Tori very determinedly went to see if she could find a store of actual food– like bananas or something, since everyone was obsessed with them. She somehow ended up in Orochimaru’s private lab instead, flipping through his notebooks.

“What are you _doing?”_ Suigetsu asked. “I’m absolutely going to tell on you.”

“If he didn’t want me here, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. These notebooks were better than the ones in the regular lab. The handwriting was all rushed and and excited and harder to read, but she found things like modifications to the Impure World Reincarnation and Orochimaru’s old experiments on cloning Senjuu Hashirama.

Tori went back to lab feeling refreshed. Keizo was sitting at his bench, looking haggard.

“Nice to see you’re back,” Tori greeted cheerfully. “Your spleen processed beautifully. Only two bone slivers, not even that big.”

Keizo glared at her, and Tori hummed as she went back to work.

 

\--

 

Things, of course, went terribly wrong immediately after that.

Tori was summoned to the infirmary before breakfast, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. Karin and Sasuke were sitting around, which also wasn’t strange. Kabuto made them wait while he shuffled through some paperwork, which was typical obnoxious behavior for him.

Karin stood at least ten feet away from Sasuke, shuffling nervously and pulling at her sleeves, which should have clued Tori into something being off. It didn’t, though, and she only whined a little bit about Kabuto rolling up her sleeve and injecting her with a clear liquid.

Tori sat on the edge of an examination table, swinging her legs and waiting for the drug to take effect. She was feeling a little light headed, and Sasuke seemed to be so bored he was nodding off in his seat.

It was… cute. Sasuke was what one would call a “handsome young man,” and it made for an adorable sleepy face.

Karin was leaning against the edge of another examination table, examining her nails. Tori was just beginning to think Karin must be pretty upset over something to not being cooing at Sasuke, when Kabuto stood up, crossed the room, and then slit Karin’s throat.

She was dead before her body hit the floor.

Tori would have thought she’d scream in this situation. She didn’t. She was perfectly quiet, and her entire body tensed, her blood suddenly running cold and frantic. She sat perfectly still on her place on the table, hands gripping the edge as hard as she could.

Sasuke let out an annoyed _tch._

Kabuto moved over to a sink to wash off his kunai.

“Well, Tori-chan?” he asked. “What does it look like to see someone’s future cut off?”

Tori’s mind shut down. Had she made specifications about if the future could be changed? Surely she had. What should she say? That all the strings of fate snapped? That they faded? That– that–

Surely Kabuto hadn’t just murdered Karin just for _this._

Surely Karin was too useful.

Surely Sasuke would be upset and not just mildly disgusted.

Surely Karin had left for the Southern hideout by now. She had no reason to lie about that.

How stupid did Kabuto think Tori was?

Very stupid, maybe– he’d seen her vomit and cry and beg to be let free. He’d listened to her ramble about all sorts of stupid shit, like passion fruits and potatoes and drug-induced nonsense that occasionally came out in Spanish. He thought she didn’t understand how to do a jumping jack.

Tori was feeling very overwhelmed and wanted to cry. She could probably stop herself. She didn’t, though, and let her voice crack a few times to cover up her delayed response.

“Why did you _do_ that?” she sobbed. “I don’t even know who this is. What kind of an experiment is this?”

“It’s Karin,” Kabuto insisted. “You can see her fate. What does it look like now?”

“No, it’s _not_ Karin, because I couldn’t see her fate, and I’m definitely not going to see anything _now_.” Tori hiccupped and rubbed tears from her eyes.

Sasuke stood up and told Kabuto that Tori’s chakra still hadn’t change at all, except in the way chakra usually changes when civilian women panicked.

“If you’re not going to let me question her,” he concluded, “I’m not participating in these anymore.”

Sasuke left. Tori continued to cry uselessly on the examination table until Kabuto kicked her out. He didn’t even have the patience to summon someone to escort her.

Tori wandered back to her cell. She was still mildly lightheaded and upset. Given the experiment was to trick her with– with a genjutsu or a bunshin or a henge or something– Kabuto had probably just given her a placebo injection. The lightheaded feeling was just her own nerves.

She didn’t _like_ people being killed on her behalf. It filled her with guilt and made her sick to her stomach. At the same time, though, she wasn’t going to lose sleep over it. This wasn’t the first person who’d died because of her, and it wasn’t going to be the last.

She hoped she never became so numb to it she couldn’t cry over it anymore. Aside from her own moral integrity, crying on command had become her lifeline here. No one was going to push her too hard if they thought she was already at her breaking point.

By the time she got back to her cell, Tori’s limbs felt heavy. She was going to nap until someone realized she’d never shown up for work and made her do something. Yes, that sounded good.

When she got to her cell, she paused at the door. It swung shut behind her with enough force to make her stumble forward step.

Someone had been in her room. Her futon– which she folded up every morning as per the rules enforced by Snarly-nin– was rolled out, and someone had filled it with a curiously macabre sight.

A pair of disembodied eyes stared up at her, on either side a severed ear. A nose and someone’s lips sat beneath the eyes on the bed, arranged as a human face. Below them, a heart nestled between two lungs, and below them a liver, a stomach, a pancreas, the spiral of intestines.

It stunk of formaldehyde.

The face looked almost funny. It was certainly silly-looking, like building a face out of emojis.

At least whoever did this was thoughtful enough to do it the day before laundry day. She’d have the sheets cleaned and then… and then…

Her legs wobbled. She leaned against the door and sunk to the floor. What did this mean?

The organs were clearly from the lab. They were too clean to come straight from a person– no blood, and all the fat had been cut away. She was sure there were some organs sitting around in the infirmary, but they wouldn’t smell like preservatives.

So, either someone snuck into the lab and stole them for an elaborate prank or…

She forced herself to stand and regarded the almost-person with critical eyes. Stomach, pancreas, liver with the gallbladder, but no spleen.

It wasn’t a prank. It was a threat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter some SHIT HITS THE FAN and we will meet another Akatsuki member!! Maybe even two, depending on how many words it takes me to get there. ;)
> 
> The next time a chapter ends up this long I am just going to split it in two– you’ll get updates faster and I won’t be stuck editing a 30 page document through my own frustrated tears. I didn’t do that with this one because I don’t actually really want to be writing about Tori in Sound, so I didn’t want to end up with five chapters about it. I like worldbuilding Sound, but it’s meant to be more like a practice run for navigating an entire organization of S-rank ninja. :P


	5. tori slam dunks canon into the trash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tori does her very best not to die and makes a friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** for human experimentation (including on children!!) is still in effect.

Tori sat in the corner of her cell, staring at the organs on display in front of her.

In the best case scenario, someone– and by someone she meant ‘almost definitely Keizo’– wanted to scare her. In the worst case scenario, he was threatening bodily harm that he intended to follow through on. 

She couldn’t ignore this. She had to act. 

The cell doors could not be opened from the inside unless you were a ninja trained to break out of locked rooms, which Tori wasn’t, so she had to wait for Snarly-nin to come let her out. When he did, he didn’t comment on Tori’s futon filled with horrors. She dutifully followed the line of murderous children to the mess hall, grabbed one of the metal trays, and left the hall. She marched right past Snarly-nin as if it was her right to do so, and he didn’t say anything. 

She kicked off a shoe to jam the door to her cell while she loaded the organs onto the tray. Then she took her tray of human remains to the lab and slammed them down on the seal Keizo was currently working on. 

“Next time put down a tarp first,” she hissed. 

She went back to her own bench, pulling open the drawer she’d hidden make-up and hair ties in. The hair ties she’d found scattered all over the lab– Orochimaru liked to tie his hair back to work, in his only demonstrable commitment to standard lab safety– and she’d gathered a few for herself. 

Before she was done twisting her hair back in a bun, Keizo appeared behind her, silent as a cat. She jumped as her elbow brushed the front of his lab coat. 

“You were so confident,” he said, quieter than he normally spoke, all tight and controlled. Tori froze with the hair tie halfway on, suddenly remembering the sting of Keizo hitting her face. “I just wanted you to know, fuuinjutsu relies on conviction. You didn’t prove anything and you’re not that clever. Orochimaru-sama was letting you placebo yourself.”

Tori very carefully kept her face straight. She finished tying her hair back.

“Just so you know,” Keizo concluded, then moved away. 

_ Just so you know, so it’s not a placebo anymore, _ Tori finished for him. 

“You sound awfully overconfident yourself,” Tori said back. She didn’t say it very loud, which was lucky because once it was out of her mouth, it seemed like a deeply stupid thing to say to a mean ninja man whose spleen she’d stolen. 

Keizo didn’t respond, and Tori very awkwardly went back to what she was working on, which was getting a scent containing seal to work. It didn’t look like anything else she’d learned, but it was useful for surgeries that went wrong and were therefore… extra smelly. 

She was practicing with a bottle of beta-mercaptoethanol, which smelled like the devil’s farts. It was good motivation to get the seal right, and so she was concentrating so hard she didn’t even notice Keizo had left until he was back with a child. 

The kid was one of the new recruits– the little girl who’d been so offended over Tori’s missing eyebrows. 

“Prep her for surgery,” Keizo commanded. “I have a lot of work to make up.”

The girl stared at Tori, wide-eyed. 

“But…” Tori started. 

“Prep. Her,” Keizo gritted out, and Tori did.

In all the surgeries Tori had seen here, the standard procedure was to cover the face with a cloth that had a complicated seal for keeping the patient alive and anesthetized. When she had the girl properly sedated and laid out, Keizo come over and removed the cloth. 

“But–” Tori said, and Keizo put a scalpel in her hand. 

“Make the first incision,” he said. 

Tori stared down at the girl’s face. It was the face of a child. The face of someone Tori had shared meals with. Her stomach churned. 

“Go on,” Keizo urged. “Cut her open. You’ve done it before.”

Tori’s hand shook as she hovered the blade over the girl’s skin. “Her chances of survival are higher with the stabilizing–”

“I don’t care,” Keizo said, cutting her off. “We’re doing it this way.”

Tori went through with it, robotically. She cut the girl open, and then Keizo shoved her aside to apply his seals. He did it faster and sloppier than normal, and didn’t stop even as the girl’s organs began to swell. Her abdomen bloated as tumors grew, and her limbs twitched as her eyes fluttered, and then–

Tori walked out. Her head felt like it was floating. If Keizo said anything, she didn’t hear. 

Her feet took her on autopilot to Orochimaru’s private lab. It was quiet in there, with cool, soothing lighting, and she stood among the rows of jarred organs and very quietly allowed herself to have a panic attack. 

“Ah, Suigetsu said you’d been sneaking around here,” Orochimaru purred. 

He stood at the end of the aisle, wearing a white yukata that might have been his pajamas. He had bags under his eyes, not quite covered by his make-up. 

Tori started to stammer out an apology, flinching away as he approached, but Orochimaru simply said, “If I didn’t want you in here, you wouldn’t be.”

Tori shut her mouth. Orochimaru leaned over her to examine the jar she’d been looking at. It was some ninja’s brain and spinal column.

“Imagine,” Orochimaru said, tapping the glass with one manicured finger. “This is all that you are, just a bundle of nervous tissue.”

“Is it?” Tori asked, and Orochimaru looked down at her. “Um, I mean, because… because, chakra seems to hold some personality…”

Orochimaru tilted his head at her. “What do you mean?”

Tori meant that she knew you could put your chakra into something and come back as a ghost when plot convenient, but instead she said, “I mean, you can transfer bodies without moving your nervous system, right?”

“Ah, yes,” Orochimaru. “You are also your heart, I suppose, the source of chakra.”

“Poetic,” Tori said, and Orochimaru laughed softly. 

“You found your heart,” Orochimaru said. It wasn’t a question. “And you’ve been reading all my notes. How nosy.”

Tori felt herself tense again, but then Orochimaru let out another soft, humming laugh. 

“They were fascinating,” Tori mumbled. Orochimaru raised a delicately shaped eyebrow at her, and Tori continued, “You cloned the Shodaime Hokage’s DNA into an infant just by applying the cells. I can barely wrap my head around it. In my world, we’d have to use, like… zinc fingers or a retrovirus, and even then you can’t just write in an entirely new genome to a complex organism...”

“Ah,” Orochimaru said, gesturing for her to follow him back towards his work table. He settled into a chair. “Poor Keizo has been begging me to let you go, you know. But how can I, when you always say such interesting things?” 

Tori had to work very hard not to let panic show on her face. Orochimaru leaned back in his chair, studying her. 

“Speaking of Keizo,” he drawled, “why aren’t you in lab?”

“Oh, um…” Tori averted her eyes, and mumbled out an explanation about Keizo behaving aggressively towards her, to the point where it even made his own work sloppy. “I want to work hard, I really do,” she concluded, “but I don’t know how I can if I have to be worried about my safety every second of the day.”

“Hm, that is a tricky situation,” Orochimaru said sympathetically. Tori felt hope bubble in her chest, and then he said, “I wonder what you’ll do?”

“I’m not– I can’t–” Tori stuttered out. She didn’t have any power here, socially or physically, she didn’t have any allies, and she wasn’t tough enough to deal with it on her own. 

“Nonsense,” Orochimaru interrupted her, waving a hand. “You’re smart, you’re creative. I’m sure you can find a solution. In fact–” he leaned forward, gold eyes warm with excitement, “I am fascinated to see which of you manages to kill the other first.”

Tori’s legs went weak. Kill?  _ Kill? _

“I think I’ll tell Keizo he can do what he wants with you next time he asks,” Orochimaru continued, drumming his fingers on the table. “So I suppose you have until then to find your solution. Unless you think you can fend off a ninja actively trying to kill you?”

He smiled at her. 

Tori heard herself say she needed to get back to work, and then left.

This was… this was bad. 

She paced the halls randomly, thinking furiously about her predicament. 

She didn’t want to die. She definitely didn’t want to be  _ murdered _ by Keizo of all people. She had been complicit in enough murder and death by now to be confident she could kill a person for her own survival, provided she had the opportunity. But how could she get such an opportunity?

Or… maybe she could find an alternative solution. Would Keizo still want her dead if she transferred out of the lab? Probably, and probably Orochimaru wouldn’t let her. Was there a way to get Keizo transferred to another hideout, maybe…?

Tori nearly collided with someone as she rounded a corner. He was sweaty and carrying a water bottle and a banana, probably a post-training snack. He neatly sidestepped her, and it took Tori’s brain a couple seconds to register she’d just walked past Sasuke. 

He’d already paused and turned around when she called his name in desperation. 

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Sasuke started to say, and Tori interrupted with, “I want to make a deal with you.”

Sasuke paused, looking her up and down. She probably looked extra frazzled. “A deal?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” Tori said. “You do me a favor, and then I tell you everything you want to know.”

“What type of favor?” Sasuke asked. 

“I just need you to take care of someone for me–”

“No deal,” Sasuke said, and moved to walk around her. 

Right, okay, Sasuke was still a good shounen protagonist who didn’t kill people at this point. Tori knew that,  _ stupid– _

She blocked his path, holding her arms out like some sort of demented crossing guard. 

If Tori had had more time to think things through and plan, she might have asked for protection from Sasuke, or for some sort of weapon or blackmail she could use against Keizo. But in that moment she was panicked and desperate, and so she went with the next idea that sprang to mind. 

“You want to know about your brother, right?” she said, and Sasuke’s eyes widened slightly. “Give me that banana, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

Sasuke glanced down at the fruit in his hand, looking beyond confused for a moment. Then his face cleared and he said, “Deal.”

Tori told Sasuke about Akatsuki, that they wandered around in pairs committing dastardly deeds for money and searching for jinchuriki. She told him where he’d eventually meet Itachi. He asked about Itachi’s eyes, and she told him about Susanoo and the eternal Mangekyou sharingan. 

Caught in the moment like this, Tori did not tell him about Danzo or Itachi’s illness or Obito, because he did not ask. She wanted to move through this conversation into the next part of her plan as quickly as possible, and it did not even occur to her to tell Sasuke any more than what he was asking for. 

“Do I win?” Sasuke finally asked. 

“Yes,” she said. 

Sasuke forfeited his banana, and Tori shoved it into her pocket and ran off. Dinner was soon, and she needed to talk to someone there. 

 

\--

 

Tori sat down across from Haruka in the mess hall. “I need you to do me a favor,” she said. 

Haruka snorted and did not even look up to acknowledge Tori’s presence. 

“I can get you a banana,” Tori said. 

Haruka paused in the middle of breaking up a chunk of gross dry fish into her rice. 

“It’s perfectly ripe,” Tori said. “No green but still firm. I’m tempted to eat it myself…”

“Do you honestly expect me to believe you have a banana?” Haruka asked. She met Tori’s eyes then, the line of her mouth hard and displeased. 

Tori leaned back in her seat and poked the banana under her shirt, exactly the way she’d seen people in movies show off their gun under their clothes.

Haruka stared at it and her face twitched as she fought back the expression of lustful yearning that briefly flashed across her features. In a deeply unhappy voice she said, “What sort of favor?”

“I’m having, um,” Tori said, “a sort of… interpersonal problem.”

“I can’t kill our warden,” Haruka said flatly, as if Tori was stupid enough to think that was an option. 

“No, it’s the other lab tech,” Tori answered. “I even have permission from Orochimaru-sama to get rid of him, I just, you know, can’t.”

“I don’t really see why you can’t,” Haruka drawled, returning to mixing up her food again. “Other than you being a coward and a weakling and a moron. But alright, give me the banana and I can make that happen for you.”

“I have your word?” Tori asked, leaning forward over the table. She extended her pinky finger. 

“Oh my god, are you really doing that?” Haruka asked incredulously. 

Haruka shook her pinky anyway. The banana was passed under the table, and for a quarter of a second, Haruka looked exactly like a kid in a candy store before she wrestled her scowl back onto her face. Tori went to bed feeling more hopeful than she had in a while. 

Unfortunately, that night the entirety of the Village Hidden in the Sound went to complete and utter shit. 

 

\--

 

When the morning lights came on, Snarly-nin never came to let her out and herd all the new recruits to their assigned placements. Although it had never happened before, Tori wasn’t immediately worried. Leaving her in isolation with no explanation seemed like something that would happen in Oto. 

She curled back up on her futon and drifted back off to sleep. 

She didn’t know how much time passed, but eventually she had to pee and became annoyed with her predicament. When she couldn’t hold it anymore, she squatted over the drain in the floor and attempted to aim. 

It was very fortunate she had a towel.

Eventually she couldn’t even nap any more, and she was hungry and thirsty, and the scenario still didn’t seem off to her until there was a lot of noise outside her cell– yelling and then some crashing. 

It was quiet for a long while after that, and hunger bit at her stomach and nervousness started to hitch in the back of her mind. They wouldn’t let her  _ starve _ to death, surely. Or, no, she’d die of dehydration first, wouldn’t she? How long could a person go without water?

The lights went out again, signalling the end of the day, and Tori laid back down on her futon and thought about how terrible it would be to die like this. 

It took weeks to die of starvation. This was just torture, surely, and eventually Kabuto would pull her out and coo condescending things to her while he stuck an IV in her, and possibly make her beg for food, and it would be humiliating but she wasn’t going to  _ die _ –

There was more yelling, suddenly, and she bolted up and threw herself through the pitch black to the door. 

“HEY,” she yelled, banging on the door as hard as she could. “HEY, what’s going on?!”

The yelling paused, and voice said, “Who’s that?”

“Tori,” Tori replied. “Tori Mendoza.”

“Oh,” said the voice. “Nevermind.”

“What do you MEAN?” Tori yelled back. “What’s happening?”

The voice was gone though, the yelling moving down the hall, and Tori pressed her ear to the door. She caught a lot of shouts to  _ hurry up _ and  _ before that glasses snake comes back, _ and then someone closer to her door said, “...he’s really dead?”

Another voice answered, coming closer as it spoke, and Tori caught the last part of the explanation: “...found his body.”

“Who? What if they’re lying?”

“I don’t know, the cleaner. You really think civillains are good enough to lie to a shinobi?”

“But which cleaner–”

“Fuck, Touma, I don’t know who cleans Orochimaru-sama’s rooms–”

The voices were too far away to be heard after that. It didn’t matter. Tori’s brain was in the process of rebooting, her body stuck frozen with her face pressed up against the door.

Someone was dead in Orochimaru’s room. That was not weird, in itself. In fact, that just sort of sounded like an inevitability. It wasn’t something to start a ruckus over. 

Unless it was Orochimaru himself who was dead, which seemed unlikely. If he could come back after Itachi had literally sealed him away with a mythical sword, then being a corpse wasn’t likely to slow Orochimaru down very much at all. Besides, what in this stupid ninja world could do him in, anyway? The mysterious illness that made him “indisposed”? Tori had just sort of assume it was the chakra version of organ rejection, easily solved by hopping bodies, even if Sasuke wasn’t available–

Oh. 

Sasuke.

In the manga, Sasuke had definitely ambushed an infirmed Orochimaru and killed him, once he’d decided it was time to go after his brother. 

Because of her, now Sasuke knew where to look for Itachi. 

“Oh no,” Tori whispered into the dark. 

 

\--

 

The lights came back on, and Tori concluded that she was abandoned and in very real danger of starving to death in her cell after all. 

No one was coming for her. She had to get out herself. 

This was literally the second time since she’d gotten to this world that she’d accidentally created a situation where she was locked in a room while the world outside went nuts. If she got out, she was definitely learning to pick locks, or break them, or… or however you got out of locked rooms. 

The door didn’t even have a handle on this side. There was a metal disc that marked where the handle existed on the other side, and the seam around the door was so flush is was barely visible. There weren’t even hinges on this side. 

Snarly-nin had lectured them a few times about not breaking out of their cells, meaning he thought literal children were capable of it. Granted, they were ninja children, but Tori was smarter than a child, right?

Tori scanned the room for items to help her. Her neatly folded spare clothes and bed linens didn’t seem very helpful, but she managed to pry the rusty drain cover up. A tool!

But what did she do with her tool? What would a ninja do?

She attempted to wedge the drain cover under the the metal disc of the handle to maybe pry it off, but it was set too firmly into the door. Then she tried sticking it between the door and the wall around where she knew the hinges were, but dropped it when it cut into her hand painfully. 

She had no idea what a proper ninja would do, but she had an inkling of what a poorly trained ninja lab tech might try. 

Tori cut her finger tip on the edge of the drain cover, and then set about painting a seal in blood on the door. Fuuinjutsu did not require ink– just something containing chakra molded into the correct the shape. Blood was ill-advised as it wasn’t a stable conduit, according to one of the texts she’d read, but Tori was not currently interested in making a stable seal. 

Fingers, it turned out, did not contain that much blood, so she had to stop halfway through and reassess. She cut the fleshy part of her forearm, then, and dipped a section of her hair into it, just like an improvised paint brush. 

Her hair had gotten so long here it pooled in her lap when she sat, and twice had gotten caught on drawer handles in the lab. At least it was good for something now. 

When she was done, she ran to the other side of the room and threw her futon over her as cover. She waited for several very tense minutes while nothing happened.

She was still very bad at timer components, it seemed. 

She approached the seal again carefully– it was just the cooling seal, same as the one she’d exploded before, but with what was supposed to be a timer to set it off after she’d moved away. If it had exploded with just a little too much blood before, surely it would explode again if it were  _ all _ blood. 

She carefully rubbed off the circle threading through her array with her thumb, disarming it. She rubbed off some other parts and redrew others, and the resulting seal also failed to explode. 

“Come on,” Tori hissed at it, then tried making a completely new one, which her shaking hand ruined. She stepped back, took a few calming breaths, and tried a new strategy. 

She made the simplest version of the seal, dabbing on an extra thick blob of blood at the very end. The blob would drip while she protected herself, completing the circle, and  _ then _ it would go off. 

The seal exploded when she was only halfway across the room, sending her stumbling over herself, banging her right knee painfully as she fell, and throwing wooden debris into her hair. 

The explosion didn’t take out the door, but it made a large enough hole that Tori was able to snake her arm through and reach the handle. 

The outside did not look as a apocalyptic as she’s imagined. Most of the cell doors were open, but the only other real sign of chaos was a mysteriously abandoned pair of shoes and Snarly-nin’s dead body. His shirt was stiff and dark from dried blood. 

It was eerily quiet. Tori felt a wave of dizziness that might have been from dehydration or not eating or blood loss, but it passed after a minute and she stumbled around to open the rest of the cells. They were empty– everyone else had already managed to escape themselves. 

Food, then, Tori decided. And water. And a tetanus shot. 

Outside of the Hall E, there was more evidence something had gone wrong. Splotches of blood, discarded weapons, another couple of bodies. She found a severed ear, just sitting in the middle of the corridor, and toed at it with her sandals. When she heard people running further down the corridor, and Tori pointedly walked in the opposite direction. 

The clinic was in this direction, so she went there first. Other people had clearly had a similar idea, as almost all the cabinets were wide open, with all sorts of random supplies and papers spilled across the room. 

Kabuto’s desk had been left alone, though, which was weird because it was where he kept all his snacks. The second drawer had a package of some sort of vaguely spicy rice crackers, and as she ate, Tori contemplated that it might just be the greatest thing she’d ever tasted. 

The clinic didn’t have tetanus shots, because this place didn’t have vaccines and was inhabited by madmen, but Tori found bandages on the floor and a tube of disinfectant that had rolled under an examination table. She dressed the cuts on her arm and finger between shoving crackers in her mouth. 

There was a package of candied nuts in another drawer in Kabuto’s desk, and Tori thought about how that might be the second greatest thing she’d ever tasted for about a minute before she remembered she’d literally stepped over a dead body to get here. 

Oto. Imploding. Right. 

She should run away. She had no idea where she would go, or what she would do there, but anywhere was better than here. 

There had previously been a line of ugly beige backpacks on a shelf by the door, marketed for EMERGENCY DEPLOYMENT. Tori assumed they contained supplies for people who had to run out quick, and certainly all but one of the bags had been taken. The last one was crumpled on the floor, and whoever had moved it had elected to partially empty it and leave the rest behind. 

Tori pulled it up and examined it. There was a canteen of water fastened to the side, some type of thin, silevery blanket folded at the bottom, a couple of glowsticks, a roll of senbon, and a plastic case that contained five pre-loaded syringes. 

Tori examined the syringes and wondered if the bags were meant for field medics, or if local anesthetics were just normal ninja equipment. 

She dumped the roll of senbon– she had no idea how to use them, and now wasn’t the time to try and learn– tossed in her bandages and disinfectant, and sipped the water as she went through the clinic for more supplies. Most of the obvious ones, like food and common medicines, were gone, but she did find a box of seriously strong painkillers. She chucked it into the bag, along with two ration bars she found in the back of a cabinet. 

At least if she hurt herself, she had enough drugs to  _ never feel pain again.  _

She refilled the canteen from the sink and wandered out of the clinic. If she was going to flee into the wild unknown, she probably needed other things, like… more food and… water purification tablets…?

She didn’t actually know what she needed. She knew what she wanted, though, and that was the secondhand make-up Karin had given her, still in the lab. 

She took a strange route to get to the lab, dodging around two teenaged shinobi arguing if they should hunt down someone for revenge or not, and then went straight for the drawer she’d been keeping her things in. 

It wasn’t even about the make-up, really. Tori had barely worn it in her regular life, and her eyebrows and lashes were mostly grown in by now. It was that they were things that were  _ hers. _

She justified it by remembering where she’d seen a flashlight laying around, and that the lab had tools to start a fire, and that hair ties were actually very useful. She shoved them all into her bag and then without even really thinking about it, shoved her lab notebook in too. It was  _ her _ work, after all, even if she’d resisted doing it. 

She blinked down into her bag. The lab notebook was needless extra weight, but she wanted it. 

She wanted it, but it wasn’t very very useful by itself. She dug up older notebooks, ripping out pages she wanted to keep and chucking the remaining books into a pile on the floor. It was hugely disrespectful to all the work Orochimaru had done, all the work he’d forced other captives like her to do, and… 

And. Well, good. Let all of Orochimaru’s research burn. 

She dumped isopropanol over the pile and set it one fire. She marched out of the lab feeling overly satisfied. 

She hoped he really wasn’t dead, and that he’d come back and be upset all his work was gone. She hoped it hurt him. In fact, she decided that she could put off escaping for just long enough to go back to his private lab and burn even _ more _ of it.

The first thing she did when she got there was cross to her cloned organs and carefully set her heart in her backpack. It was hers, after all. She was taking it with her. 

The notebooks up here were spread out, because Orochimaru did not organize himself in a way that made sense to anyone who lived outside of his brain, and Tori piled them all up on a table.

She had sudden doubts about destroying all of them. Most of it was, like, cool… 

“HEY,” a voice yelled, and Tori was sure both her real heart and her cloned one had an attack. 

Suigetsu was glaring at her from his tank. 

“What’s going on?” he asked. “There’s shouting outside, and no one came to feed me yesterday…”

Tori felt a pang of sympathy for him. “Orochimaru is allegedly dead,” she said. 

“Oh shit,” Suigetsu said, wide-eyed. “Hey, hey, then you can let me out, right?”

“Um…” Tori’s eyes drifted back down to her pile of notebooks. 

Suigetsu deserved to be let out. It was only human decency, after all. But he was also a not-very-nice ninja, and Tori was worried about what he’d do once he was free. He might hurt her, or do something to attract the attention of people who might hurt. Then again, she had no idea what she was doing, and making friends with a shinobi would help…

“Tell you what,” Tori said, moving over to the tank’s control panel. “We’ll help each other out. I let you out, you help me escape.”

“Sounds fair,” Suigetsu agreed immediately. He walked her through how to open the tank, a lot of water splashed over Tori’s shoes, and then she was suddenly pulled down into a headlock. 

“You’re part of the research team, right?” Suigetsu said, sounding cheerful but also holding her  _ very tightly. _ “People mentioned there being a civilian girl.”

Tori went very still. She didn’t know where he was going with this. She didn’t say anything. 

“Orochimaru-sama mentioned you were from another world,” Suigetsu continued, “but I guess girls from another world can be plain looking too, right?”

Tori  _ really _ didn’t know where he was going with this now. 

“Hmm, but you know,” Suigetsu continued, and his arm tighten around her. He was still naked, and wet, and Tori was trying very hard not to think about how he’d angled her head down to stare at his bare hip, except that she could perfectly feel the way his muscled moved around her face and neck. “I really haven’t liked anyone from the research department. They’re all mean, and nasty, and they like chopping parts of me off…”

Right, okay, this made sense. Tori also hated everyone here because they were mean and experimented on her, after all. It was a very sympathetic sort of hate. 

“I’ve never chopped parts of you off, though,” Tori managed to squeak out. 

“But you’re one of them,” Suigetsu shot back. “Maybe if I kill you, I’ll feel a little better.”

“W-well,” Tori replied, “if you kill me, how am I going to help you get what you want?”

Suigetsu’s grip loosened the slightest bit. 

_ Thank god,  _ Tori thought, followed closely by,  _ What the hell does Suigetsu want? _

“Sword,” she managed to choke out. “I can get you Momochi Zabuza’s sword.”

Suigetsu let her go, and Tori staggered away, rubbing at her neck. 

“Kubikiribocho?” Suigetsu asked, eyes narrowed at Tori suspiciously. 

Tori had forgotten the sword even had a name. “Exactly,” she said, fumbling toward her pile of lab notebooks. She’d just take them all. Yes, that was fine. 

Suigetsu jabbed her in the upper back with his index finger as she shoved books into her bag. “And how do  _ you _ know where it is?”

Tori swatted his hand away. “Haven’t you been paying attention? I can see people’s future. I can see where you find it a year from now.”

Suigetsu frowned at her for a long time, studying her face with his purple eyes. Then he grinned. “I like you, lab girl,” he said. “Lead the way.”

 

\--

 

They raided the lockers for supplies, but not before Suigetsu executed some sort of water jutsu that made all the tanks of organs explode, flooding the lab. It was… satisfying. 

Tori had never been to the locker rooms before– they were meant for active-duty ninja preparing for or returning from missions. There were three or four other ninja poking around it in, but Suigetsu threw a scruffy looking genin into a wall and the remaining scavengers fled.

The lockers were mostly picked over– as were the adjacent supply rooms where ninja could pick up rations and weapons. 

“Aw man, they took all my stuff,” Suigetsu whined from what Tori assumed was his own locker. “My favorite water bottle was in here.”

If Tori were him, would be more upset about all his clothes being stolen, since he was still standing around in the nude. 

“Who cares?” Tori said. “Once you get out, you can buy whatever water bottle you like.”

Suigetsu looked thoughtful for a moment as Tori pulled out someone’s sweaty shirt and held it out to him. 

“We don’t  _ have _ any money,” Suigetsu said, dropping someone’s dented water flask into the duffel bag he’d found and ignoring Tori’s offering. “What a civilian thing to say. Missing-nin steal.”

“Oh,” said Tori, wadding up the shirt and shoving it in her bag. If nothing else, it would pad her cloned heart. “I forgot about money.”

Suigetsu did manage to find a pair of pants and a hoodie–  _ thank God _ – and Tori added a handful of squished an expired ration bars to her bag. She figured she’d get Suigetsu to take her to a town and then she could… hmm. 

He had a good point about them not having any money. 

She rummaged through her backpack and pulled out the box of the painkillers she’d swiped form the clinic. “Could I sell these?” she asked, waving them under Suigetsu’s nose. 

Suigetsu raised an eyebrow as he dropped a half-full sheath of kunai into his bag. “I mean, not legal–  _ oh _ .” A mischievous, toothy grin spread across his face. “You could get a pretty penny for that.”

“How much, do you think?” Tori asked, casually dropping the box back into the backpack as she opened another locker. She found a set of toiletries.

He gave her a price. Tori had no idea how much that was relative to, say, the cost of rice. She nodded and examined the toiletry set’s toothbrush. Was she daring enough to use a used toothbrush?

“You’re going to share profits with me, right?” Suigetsu asked. Tori kept the toothbrush and they moved on to the weapons supply room.

Tori rolled her eyes. “Sure, if you actually get me out of here alive.”

Suigetsu casually walked up the wall to grab a  _ very _ large sword that was mounted on the wall. It was not a particularly practical weapon to flee for your life with, which was probably why it was one of the few weapons still there.

“I think we should split them 70/30,” he said, experimentally swinging the sword through the air a few times.

“I get the 70%, right?” Tori answered dryly. She didn’t want anything in the room– she was more likely to chop off her own hand than defend herself with anything in here.

“Obviously not,” Suigetsu said, jumping back down to the floor. “I’m doing all the hard work, after all.”

Tori scowled at him as he brushed past her to see what they could find in the ration’s closet.

“And you would still be stuck in a tank if not for me,” Tori countered. “Plus, I  _ found _ the damn pills.”

There were no food supplies left, but Suigetsu filled several flasks with water from a tap. They argued the entire time, and all the way up to the exit of the hideout. Most people seemed to have already evacuated– they only saw a handful of shinobi scurrying around, and no one tried to stop them.

“I don’t get why everyone was fighting,” Tori said as they picked their way over a pile of bodies right at the front door. 

“Ah, well, probably some higher ups wanted to keep order,” Suigetsu said, “and then, you know, people wanted revenge on the higher ups, or they got into a fight over who got my very awesome water bottle...”

The door out of the hideout was set into the face of a cliff, wedged open by the body of someone Tori vaguely recognized from the dining hall. 

“Shit,” Suigetsu said as they stepped out into sunlight. “I forgot the outside was so bright.”

“Me too,” Tori said, and they stood blinking stupidly at the forest around them for several minutes. 

It was bright, and the sunlight was warm, and everything was so green, and the air was  _ fresh… _

“We should run,” Suigetsu said. “Can you run?”

“No,” Tori said. “Not like a ninja.”

They awkwardly finagled Tori climbing onto Suigetsu back. He whined the whole time about it being humiliating and how it forced him to carry his sword all wrong. 

“It’s not like I’m happy about being carried,” Tori snapped back at him. “Makes me feel like a child.”

Suigetsu didn’t answer, but instead tensed under her. 

“Suigetsu?” Tori asked tentatively.

“Shit,” Suigetsu answered, and then shot into the trees. Tori let out a startled yelp and clung tighter to his shoulders. 

“The glass-bastard is back,” Suigetsu called over his shoulder at her. “I don’t know why he’d follow us when the whole hideout is up in flames, but just in case– what direction are we going?”

“Whatever direction Wave Country is,” Tori shouted back, right into his ear. 

Suigetsu changed course slightly, and then after a couple of minutes said, “Fuck, he  _ is _ following us.”

Tori gripped Suigetsu’s shoulders tighter. She didn’t think Kabuto was much of a fighter, but she also wasn’t sure if Suigetsu could take him or not. 

Suigetsu sped up and said, “You sure we need to go to Wave Country?”

“Yes,” Tori said, focusing on Suigetsu instead of the rising panic that Kabuto might catch her. Why would he need or care about her? Surely if they got far enough ahead, he’d give up on them. “Zabuza died on the bridge between the Wave Country and Fire Country, and his grave is nearby.”

A kunai whizzed by them, and Suigetsu swore some more and started zig-zagging through the trees. 

“And what, you think he was buried with Kubikiribocho?” Suigetsu asked through gritted teeth.

“It marks his grave by the bridge,” Tori said. 

Suigetsu grunted, then dodged another two kunai. Tori found herself vaguely hoping that she’d filled her backpack with another random stuff it would defend her against a shuriken in the back. 

“Just so you know,” Suigetsu said after a bit, shifting her weight on his back. “This is nothing personal; you’re just heavy.”

Tori was already falling when her brain proceeded what he’d said. The bastard had dropped her, effortlessly prying her arms from around his shoulders. 

_ Stupid, _ she thought,  _ you already told him what he wanted.  _

A branch broke her fall, then she broke the branch, and it deposited her onto the forest floor. She landed on her back, and for a few terrifying seconds she couldn’t breathe.

Kabuto appeared over her, glaring down at her prone form. Tori glared back up as her lungs finally forced air into her body.

“I see you’ve been busy,” Kabuto said lightly, even as he grabbed her harshly and dragged her from the ground.

Tori didn’t say anything. Instead, she focused the entirety of her mental energy on not crying out of fear and frustration and anger. She’d been  _ so close _ to escaping.

Kabuto’s hands glowed blue and he pinched the nape of her neck. Tori felt her entire body go numb and collapsed. She couldn’t even yell in panic as she fell forward back towards the ground.

“Don’t worry,” Kabuto hummed as he caught her. “That will wear off. I just need you to be still while I go to meet a friend.”

He heaved her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, then set off bounding through the forest.

Tori’s mind was racing. Where was he taking her? What friend? She could think of  _ nothing _ he’d need her for. At least when Kakuzu had hauled her off to Orochimaru, she’d known what was happening. At least she could still move, still  _ talk _ . As she was, she could barely breathe.

She had never been more terrified in her entire life.

Eventually Kabuto stopped and gently placed her on the ground. They were still in the middle of the woods.

“Hmm, I’ll need you to be able to see…”

From her position, Tori could only see his feet as he paced around a bit. Then he leaned over and dragged her across the ground and through a bush, propping her up into a sitting position against a boulder. He then proceeded to arrange and rearrange her like a ragdoll until he was satisfied she could see through the bush into the clearing properly.

It was demeaning and humiliating.

“Now Tori-chan,” Kabuto said, addressing her cheerfully. “I’m to meet a very important person here, and I need you to watch them for me. See if you can tell anything about their future plans.”

He beamed down at her, and Tori wished she could move enough to spit on him. He kept talking, “I thought you were faking your abilities for a long while, but, well, after Karin-san… you’re not quite clever enough to fake that, are you?”

Deep in her stomach, Tori felt her fear and humiliation hitch and convalesce into  _ hatred _ .

Kabuto walked back into the clearing, and sure enough she had a perfect view of him as he flashed some hand seals. There was no visual evidence of any jutsu, however, and he simply stood there.

Tori, without proper control of her jaw, had started drooling on herself. She was going to  _ kill _ him. With no way to work her rage out physically, she simply stewed inside herself, fantasizing about stabbing Kabuto in his smug face.

At the very least, she decided, she was going to convince him his weird jutsu had prevented her from seeing anyone’s fate. Make him feel like he’d screwed  _ himself _ over. She imagined the look on his face when he realized how he’d shot himself in the foot, and it was almost as satisfying as smothering him to death with a pillow.

(Okay, it wasn’t  _ nearly  _ as satisfying.)

Suddenly, Kabuto made a subtle shift in his demeanor. His posture became less cocky and his aura meeker.

Sasori entered the clearing.

He was wearing Hiruko, his hulking, beady-eyed puppet. He looked like small mountain draped in a black and red cloak.

If Tori had been able to move, she would have gasped.

She had completely forgotten that Kabuto had been a double agent, pretending to be Sasori’s lackey. 

_ Oh no, _ she thought.  _ Oh  _ **_fuck._ **

“You’re late,” Sasori rasped.

“My apologies, Sasori-sama,” Kabuto answered, bowing his head. “Oto has been very chaotic, and I had some trouble getting away unnoticed.”

Kabuto smoothly gave Sasori a very detailed report of on-goings in Oto, and Tori knew for a fact several key points were complete bullshit. Kabuto did confirm that Sasuke had killed Orochimaru and then disappeared into the night.

Tori missed most of Sasori’s spitting rage in reaction to that when something crawled onto her hand. Her hand twitched, the prickly feet of the creepy-crawly disappeared, and a beetle flew past her face.

Tori rolled her eyes down as far as they could go, staring at her hand. It had moved. She concentrated and it twitched again. She tried moving other parts of her body. She felt a toe curl.

Gleefully, Tori commanded her entire body to wiggle, seeing what else she could move. The jutsu was wearing off! If she got herself together before Sasori left, she could use the distraction to–

She slumped over to the side, a sad little gasp escaping from her lungs.

The conversation in the clearing abruptly stopped. She could no longer see through the bush.

“I told you to come alone,” Sasori growled.

“I was sure I wasn’t followed, I don’t know what–”

“ _ Take care of it _ .”

Kabuto’s footsteps were silent, but after a few seconds his face appeared through the bush.

His body was calm, but the look he gave Tori was livid. She stared back at him, her face and body completely lax.

A kunai whizzed by her face and she nearly flinched. Nearly because she’d been concentrating so hard on  _ don’tmovedon’tmovedon’tmove _ that she wasn’t sure she could do much of anything without half a second of mental backtracking.

Kabuto chuckled. “It was just a rabbit,” he called.

He reached through the bush and grabbed a dead rabbit from next to her. That had definitely  _ not _ been there before. He retrieved the kunai slightly further to the left– it had a weird-looking tag wrapped around the handle.

Kabuto stood and returned to Sasori, who seemed to accept his story.

Had the dead rabbit been a  _ summons _ ? Did Kabuto just walk around with dead-rabbit-summoning kunai or had he planned for this?  _ What the hell was wrong with him? _

For a moment, Tori was positive that Kabuto had god-like predictive powers and knew her every move. Hopelessness flooded through her.

Her entire arm moved as she slumped. She almost had control again.

She pushed aside her self-doubt. No, he had prepared the rabbit summons because he was fastidious and hiding someone in a bush had obvious risks. He had probably prepared for all sorts of worst-case scenarios,  _ including _ one in which she regained control of her body before Sasori left.

Tori closed her eyes and tuned out Kabuto’s theories on how Sound Country would react to Orochimaru’s death.

Kabuto wasn’t so inefficient he’d make preparations for unlikely scenarios, plus she doubted he’d had that much time to prepare. But ‘likely’ scenarios relied on what Kabuto  _ thought _ she (and Sasori, she supposed) would do, as opposed to what she’d actually do. 

Tori rolled over and pushed herself to her knees. Sasori was already snarling at Kabuto about  _ only a rabbit _ .

“Hey, Sasori,” she yelled hoarsely as she got to her feet.

Kabuto thought she was snivelling coward. He probably thought she’d try to crawl away, if she dared disobey him at all.

“Orochimaru got rid of your jutsu-thing ages ago. He’s playing you.”

He also probably thought she had enough self-preservation not to yell at angry S-ranked criminals.

He was wrong.

Kabuto made a motion, but then Hiruko’s tail shot out at grabbed him.

“If you want to live, you better have a good explanation,” Sasori hissed.

Kabuto disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Without even glancing at her, Hiruko fired several senbon in her direction. Kabuto reappeared before she could even dive for cover, blocking them with a kunai.

“I do need to keep her alive,” Kabuto said lightly, his fabricated meek demeanor gone. 

“So you  _ are _ a traitor,” Sasori snarled.

Kabuto ran at the puppet, dodging smartly around a few jabs from Hiruko’s tail. One of Hiruko’s hands emerged from the coat, spewing fire, and Kabuto skidded off to the side.

Satisfied the two were keeping each other busy, Tori turned and staggered off into the woods. She didn’t have enough control over her limbs to run, but she managed to force her body into a sort of power-limp.

_ Later, assholes. _

She almost immediately fell and stumbled down a steep slope.

_ At least it’s a faster way to travel _ , she thought to herself as she used a log to push herself back into her feet. Her ankle groaned in protest.

Eventually the sound of Sasori and Kabuto’s fight faded away as she put more distance between herself and them. She hoped Sasori killed him. Preferably with poison. Slow, painful poison.

If Kabuto managed to escape from him… well, she  _ really _ didn’t want him to find her again.

The pain in her ankle eventually faded and her body was more or less back to normal. Tori realized she was walking very quickly and very aimlessly through an unknown forest. She slowed down and retrieved a ration bar from her miraculously still intact backpack. She broke off half of it and chewed on the tasteless thing as she traipsed through the forest.

She thought about all the survival shows she’d watched. Those were all about starting fires and building shelters and  _ lasting _ until someone found you… and she didn’t want anyone to find her. Or, people on those shows would figure out a way to get somewhere where they could call for help. She had no idea where  _ that _ would be either.

Eventually, she found a deer trail and decided to follow it. The deer had to know something, right?

The trail went straight down or up several annoyingly steep hills, but eventually it led to a pond filled with frog scum. It was getting dark, so she ate the rest of the ration bar and settled down under a tree with her thermal blanket to sleep.

In the morning, feeling sore and both physically and emotionally drained, she skirted the pond and found another trail, this one wider than a regular deer trailer.

A people trail?

After about an hour of walking, it led to the edge of a farm and then a wide dirt road with a road sign and she nearly wept with joy. She followed the sign for the closest town. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, Suigetsu, my precious murder son...
> 
> And ah, Sasori, my precious murder puppet man...
> 
> I'm not good at replying to comments, but I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has commented, kudo'd, and bookmarked. You all are seriously the best and I'm glad you've enjoyed reading! Next chapter we meet another Akatsuki. I bet you can guess exactly who!


	6. improvise. adapt. overcome.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tori tries her best and another Akatsuki makes a dramatic entrance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: Tori sells "painkillers" to some youths. I never actually name them, but I imagine this might be upsetting to some readers? There's also mentions of underaged drinking and smoking.

The town was all wide, tree-line roads and well-kept row houses with stone fronts. There was a public fountain in the main square, where Tori refilled her canteen. She took a few sips as she people-watched and tried to think of what to do next.

She needed money, first and foremost, because she only had a few ration bars and lacked the skills to forage or steal more food. Eventually she’d need other things as well, like proper shelter and access to a shower and laundry and pads and tampons, _oh god_ –

And transport. She needed to get as far away from here as fast as she could.

And then… and then she didn’t know what she’d do but she’d find a quiet place to stay and be safe away from crazy ninja.

She felt her eyes go hot. Even if she got away, she’d never be _home_. This was her life now, homeless and penniless and with no friends or family.

She didn’t cry, didn’t let herself cry. She just sat on a bench in the square, miserably watching people pass. No one seemed to notice her.

Eventually she got up and wandered the town a bit more, eyeing a cart selling cold drinks and fried street food enviously. She dug around in the trash can next to the cart, found no edible looking left overs but several plastic cups, and then went back to the main square and placed a cup in front of her on the cobbled ground. By the time the sun went down, she’d eaten two more ration bars and three people had dropped coins into her cup.

She squinted at the coffee shop across the street. She barely had enough for their cheapest pastry.

She dumped the coins into her pocket. She needed to sell her pilfered painkillers.

 

\--

 

Tori stood in the bathroom of a convenience store and frowned at her reflection in the mirror above the sink.

She’d forgotten how hideous her Oto uniform was compared to what normal people got to wear. Walking around in matching grey shirt and grey pants definitely made her look like an escaped prisoner. She switched out the shirt for the one she’d grabbed from a locker. It was navy blue with armpit sweat stains and was way too big on her.

She pulled it back and tied the excess fabric into a knock at the base of her back. Now it just looked like a weird fashion statement on a very dirty person.

Her hair was wild, her curls reduced entirely to frizz with inches of dead ends at the bottom, so she braided it to the side, hiding the scar on her neck from when Haruka stabbed her. Then she painted on a generous amount of eyeliner and lip gloss, and transformed herself from a prisoner into…

...someone who definitely had gone through some serious shit, was very dirty, and had no money.

Well. She _was_ trying to sell drugs, she supposed.

The man working the counter of the store didn’t say anything when she walked out. This was her second time using the store bathroom without buying anything, and the man had yet to acknowledge her presence.

 

\--

 

Tori walked the now dark town, peering down alleys and looking for the type of shady people who might want to buy drugs from a very dirty person. Not for the first time, she wished Suigetsu was with her.

Suigetsu would have at least thought he knew what to do, and any sort of guidance would be comforting, even if it was the guidance of an obnoxious and murder-happy teenaged boy. Having Suigetsu around as muscle would also make her feel better approaching someone to make a deal– what was to stop anyone from just making her give them the pills without paying her? She wasn’t a fighter; anyone could just hurt her and do what they wanted.

That’s how it would be in Oto, anyway.

On the edge of town, she did find a road of mostly abandoned houses, where a group of loud people had built a bonfire in the street. It smelled like weed. It seemed like it was worth it to at least approach them.

She walked right by them twice, too cowardly to say anything. Suigetsu would be really useful right now.

She paced the streets, thinking furiously about what to say, what to do.

The town was designed so all roads lead back to the main square, where she inevitably ended up. It was filled with teengaers now, divided up into little groups around benches, passing around soda bottles that Tori would bet her cloned heart were watered down with alcohol.

The town had quieted down for the night, making the teenagers seem incredibly loud and boisterous, and Tori hovered at the edge of the square.

She had thinking about this all wrong. She wasn’t in Oto anymore; she was in a normal town with normal people and their normal teenaged children. Tori could totally handle civilian teens. She’d spent a good portion of her life _being_ a civilian teen, after all.

Besides, hadn’t the drug scene at her university been mostly rich kids buying pot and each other’s prescription drugs?

Tori strolled up to the closest group of teens as casually as she possibly could and said, “Friday night, huh?”

She pitched her voice as low and husky as she should could, trying to make herself seem older and world weary.

The group went silent, staring at her like she was some sort of novelty. One of the boys, crouched on the ground, had a cigarette in his mouth. Tori leaned over him and asked, “Yo, got any spares?”

The boy just stared at her. Someone to her left said, “It’s Saturday…?”

“Ah,” Tori said. “You know, time…”

And then she decided that this wasn’t going well at all and moved on to the next group without saying anything further.

“Well, _they_ were boring,” she announced to group number two, and that received a round of drunken laughs. “Who’s got a cigarette?”

A guy passed her one, and then one of only two girls in group flicked a lighter on for her. Tori placed the cigarette in her mouth and leaned in to light it, cupping one hand around the flame to protect it from the wind and holding her hair back with her other hand, the way she’d seen cool people in movies do.

Then she inhaled and it took every ounce of herself control not to cough from whatever demonic ritual she’d just exposed her lungs to. She kept her face smooth even as her lungs burned with Satan’s revenge, and then she exhaled.

Tori had never smoked in her life and she didn’t think she would ever again. Her lungs hurt.

“Who are you?” the boy who’d given her a cigarette asked.

To delay having to answer, Tori took another long drag. It was an equally bad idea the second time.

“Just a traveler passing through,” she said, her voice now deep and gritty without any acting on her part. She desperately wanted to cough. “Is there anything to do in this town? Seems boring as shit.”

The teenagers agreed, whining about how there was nothing to do but hang out here or with the potheads Tori had found earlier. They complained about how the town had started locking up a park they preferred to drink in at night, as if drinking in a park were somehow so much cooler and more exciting than drinking in the street.

“A fence…?” Tori repeated thoughtfully. She’d smoked half the cigarette. She didn’t know how far she had to go through it before she could call it quits. Did she smoke it all the way to the butt? Or was it like eating an apple, and it was perfectly acceptable to toss it when there was still a bit left? “No of- _fence_ , but why don’t you just climb it?”

The pun went over everyone’s heads.

“We’d get in trouble…” one of the girls said.

“Pfft,” Tori sniffed. “Who cares? Here, I’ll give you something good.”

She fished the painkillers out of her bag. They were in a foil roll in a thin cardboard sleeve, just like they came back in her world, if with fewer warnings on them.

“What’s it do?” a boy asked.

Tori raised her eyebrows at him as if he were a bit dumb. “Takes you where you need to go,” she said. “Makes you feel real good.”

Tori actually had no idea what the side effects were. She hoped they were good.

The girl with the lighter recognized the drug name, let out a cry out excitement, and reached for them. Tori yanked them out of her reach.

“Uh-uh,” she said. “Unfortunately I’m not quite generous to just _give_ them to you.”

There was a bit of an argument then, but eventually two of the teens went off to get their pot money and Tori finished her cigarette. She made a show of counting the wad of bills they gave her. She’d never even seen bills in this world before, and they felt like monopoly money.

“You’re a little short,” she said, glancing around.

They gave her a bottle of spiked soda to make up the difference. Tori passed them the pills, and swaggered out of the square as casual as she could. That had been _easy._

She made a beeline for a hotel she’d seen earlier. It was cheap, and the mattress was lumpy, but it was a real bed. The room came with packets of fruity smelling shampoo, and she stayed in the hot shower for as long as she wanted.

She slept in until the cleaning lady kicked her out, then spent a few hours wandering the town and buying supplies– a hairbrush, toiletries, some clothes from a second-hand store. She bought some cheap canned tuna, two bags of something marked PROTEIN BITS, and some dried fruit. She dumped the soda to make room.

She changed clothes in the bathroom of a cute cafe and bakery, shoving her Oto clothes in the trash. She walked out of the bathroom in much more reasonable clothes and with a spring in her step. She bought a pastry, the woman behind the counter was friendly to her, and for the first time in ages, Tori felt like her life was finally going to be alright.

Yes, she thought as she walked out of the café, muffin in hand– things were looking up for Tori Mendoza.

The only warning she got was a shadow suddenly appearing over her.

Tori screamed and dropped her muffin. The ground disappeared beneath her and she went up, up, up over the roofs of the houses, something pulling her up by the shoulders.

“WHAT THE FUCK,” she yelled, futilely kicking her legs in the air. She was flying– she was _fucking flying over the town_.

“Don’t struggle too much, yeah,” a voice called from above. “Wouldn’t want to drop you from this high up.”

Tori craned her head around as much as she could. She was attached– or being held, more accurately– to some sort of white, stone… statue.

She stared down at her shoulder. A bird’s talon was wrapped around her upper arm. A clay bird was carrying her over a forest.

“Oh no,” she moaned.

\--

 

The bird jerked to the right and dove, and Tori barely registered Sasori’s form waiting for them as the ground rushed forward. The bird dropped her some three feet from the ground and she face-planted at full force. Deidara jumped off the bird and landed lightly next to her, and the clay creature poofed out of existence.

“Oi, Danna,” Deidara called, “I brought her, yeah.”

Tori groaned and pushed herself into a sitting position. Her nose was bleeding, causing tears to well up in her eyes, and everything hurt.

“Next time get it right on the first try,” Sasori rasped as Hiruko’s hulking shadow fell over her.

“Next time give me a better description, yeah!”

Tori leaned her head back and pinched her nose to the stop the bleeding as they argued. She needed to run. Running away would be good.

Tori started scooting slowly away from them, and next thing she knew, Hiruko’s tail was stabbed into the ground next to her and Sasori was looming over her.

“Search her,” Sasori commanded.

Deidara rolled his eyes but manhandled Tori’s backpack off and tossed it aside. He then pulled her to her feet and started patting her down.

“ _Hey,_ ” Tori complained, and then Sasori cut her off with, “Why did Kabuto have you with him?”

“What?” Tori said as she watched Deidara grab her braid and examine it. Being manhandled was very distracting.

Deidara, apparently finished with his his search, yanked her hair hard enough to make her yelp and stagger to the side. “Go on, answer him.”

“You’re no ninja,” Sasori continued. “Why would Kabuto bring you along?”

Tori’s upper lip was wet with blood. She pinched her nose again and answered in a nasally voice, “I was running away from Oto and he bumped into me and recaptured me.”

Sasori called bullshit immediately. “You’re a civilian. You’d be easy to catch after our meeting. Why did he bring you along?”

Tori started to say, still in her nasally Mickey Mouse, “I had another ninja helping me–”

And then Sasori slammed her face into the ground, Hiruko’s giant hand covering her entire skull as he held her there. “Kabuto is not stupid enough to bring a civilian to a fight without reason. _Why did he bring you along?_ ”

_Why do you all hate my face?_ Tori thought back at him, her brain swimming. Outloud she said, muffled into the dirt, “He wanted my opinion on you.”

Much to her dismay, Sasori pressed her head further into the ground. “Why?”

“Mrrph,” Tori said, barely able to breathe.

“What’s that?” Deidara asked, and then stepped on her right between the shoulder blades.

Like an _asshole._

Tori raised her arm to make some sort of gesture to indicate compliance, rolled her wrist, couldn’t think of one, and somehow ended up extending her middle finger.

Deidara laughed. He shifted his weight so he was standing fully on her, and then used his free leg to kick her hand.

“Stop fooling around and search her bag,” Sasori snapped.

“What’s she going to have on her, yeah?” Deidara asked. “Camping supplies?”

Still, he got off of her, and Sasori let go of her head. Tori rolled over onto her knees, cradling her hand, and he leaned his face into hers.

“I am not a patient man,” he hissed.

“I _know,_ ” Tori hissed right back.

“Oh!” Deidara cried from several feet away, having just flipped open Tori’s bag. “ _Not_ camping supplies.”

Before Sasori could decide she was being disrespectful and smash her face into something again, Tori continued, “Kabuto wanted my opinion because I can sometimes see the future.”

“What the hell?” Deidara asked, looking up from her backpack. Sasori continued to stare her down with his creepy puppet eyes.

“Demonstrate,” Sasori demanded.

“Um, well,” Tori said, making a big show of looking Hiruko up and down. “If I were you, I wouldn’t get too cocky around your Granny Chiyo.”

“What the hell does that mean, yeah?” Deidara called. “Hey, girlie, if you know so much, what’s Danna’s hair color?”

“Red,” Tori answered. She opened and closed the hand he’d kicked experimentally. It might bruise, but it was mostly fine.

“That’s how you knew my jutsu had been removed,” Sasori concluded, which was probably better evidence than _beware your grouchy grandma._ Sasori didn’t dwell on this revelation very long and asked, “In what capacity were you affiliated with Oto?”

“Lab experiment…” Tori said as Deidara pulled her heart out of her bag and waggled his eyebrows at her. “...and then lab tech.”

“How long were you there?” Sasori said, pointedly ignoring Deidara pretending to be horrified by the heart, then pressing his ear against the glass to listen to it beat.

“Since May,” Tori said.

“Did Orochimaru or Kabuto or any high ranking shinobi ever confide in you?”

It occured to Tori then, that if things kept going like this, Sasori would get everything he wanted out of her, and then he’d probably kill her. That was, after all, more or less the mistake she’d made with Suigetsu.

She didn’t want to be killed, and she certainly didn’t want to die curled up in the dirt and sobbing at Sasori’s feet. She sat up fully and crossed her legs.

“Speaking of Kabuto,” she said, “you wouldn’t have happened to have killed him, would you?”

“Answer my question,” Sasori insisted, grabbing her around the neck.

Tori’s heart rate shot up immediately, but she forced her voice to be calm as she answered. “No one in Oto confides in other people. But, you know, I’m pretty observant.”

“Why do you have _zero_ weapons?” called Deidara, who had emptied her bag completely and scattered its contents around himself.

Tori pressed on, “There’s a lot one can learn from old lab records and medical reports. And I’m sure you want to know all the lies Kabuto told you.” Sasori’s grip tightened ever so slightly on her neck, and without thinking she grabbed Hiruko’s wrist. Her hand didn’t even come close to fitting all the way around. “And I’m sure you leader wants to know more about Orochimaru–”

“What do you know about our leader, yeah?” Deidara asked, having abandoned all of Tori’s possessions in a pile some ten feet away and come to stand behind her.

Right. The Akatsuki was supposed to be super secret. That was fine, though, because if she could convince them she really was some sort of seer, she might have some sort of way to bargain for her life.

“He calls himself ‘Pein’–” Tori began, and then Sasori’s fingers twitched against her neck.

“Orochimaru could have easily told you all of that,” he said.

“Do you really think Orochimaru would tell his lab tech a single detail about his past–” Sasori’s fingers twitched against her neck. “Could you _let go of me,_ please?”

Sasori dropped her. “I’m going to contact Leader-sama,” he stated and then walked off into the woods.

Tori rubbed her neck, blinking at his retreating back in confusion.

“Ooh, you convinced him, yeah,” Deidara said, grinning meanly at her. He was shorter than she would have anticipated– which was still at least five inches taller than her– and his dark blond hair was brassy in the warm sunlight. “Tell me, did you just find a half-packed survival kit and fill it up with random things?”

“No,” Tori muttered, even though it was an embarrassingly accurate summation of what she’d done. “I filled it up with things I wanted to keep.”

“Like a human heart,” Deidara said, crossing to poke at the jar with his foot.

“It’s _my_ heart,” Tori defended, scuttling over to pick it up herself. The glass was scuffed and there were a handful of hairline cracks, but the jar was miraculously in tact. The liquid inside must have absorbed most of the shock, because the heart inside also looked relatively undamaged.

“Like, you took it out of yourself, or like you took it from someone and now its yours…?” Deidara squinted down at the heart in her arms, interest obviously piqued.

“It’s a clone,” Tori specified.

“Is that what’s in those notebooks?” Deidara asked. He’d flipped through them and thrown them all around before shuffling them back together in a messy pile. “How to clone?”

“Well– yeah, partly,” Tori said. It occurred to her that running around with a good chunk of Orochimaru’s research on her back was a stupid idea, mostly because now other S-ranked criminals had their hands on it.

Oops?

“Would they contain why Danna is convinced Orochimaru didn’t die, even though we found his body?” Deidara asked, eyebrows raised at the pile he’d made.

Tori thought about it. There had been some ideas about cursed seals and transferring chakra networks scribbled here and there, but she didn’t think Orochimaru had written out annotated directions on how to store parts of yourself in other people, the way she knew he’d done with Anko’s cursed seal.  

But maybe it would be bad to tell Deidara she couldn’t answer questions for him; she did, after all, want to seem useful. Instead of answering outright, she said, “The possibility of Orochimaru coming back is why it’s really important you should’ve killed Kabuto.”

Deidara snorted. “Nope, slipped away like the snake he is.”

Deidara had met Kabuto exactly once for about three minutes, and Kabuto had not made a good impression. Deidara told Tori all about it– without actually mention the circumstances under which he and Kabuto had met, or anything that had actually been said– and then ended his rant with an expectant, “Well? What can you see of my future?”

Tori said something vague about red eyes and lightning, and when Sasori returned, she and Deidara were having a shouting match.

“It’s not _my_ fault if _you_ are going to make impressively bad decisions–”

“–and why should I believe you, yeah? You’re so full of bullshit–”

“Deidara,” Sasori chided, and Deidara made a rude hand gesture at Tori before turning to his partner.

“Yeah, what did Leader-sama say? We dumping her in a river?”

“ _Hey–_ ” Tori squawked.

“He was interested in her information and ability,” Sasori said, Hiruko’s tail waving lazily behind him. “We’re taking her back to headquarters for interrogation.”

Tori dropped her heart, and it rolled across the grass.

“Aw, Danna,” Deidara quipped. “You’re going to break her heart, yeah.”

He laughed at his own joke.

 

\--

 

They let her hastily shove all her things back into her bag while Deidara made another clay bird. He practically threw her onto it, then sank her feet into the clay up to her ankles.

“Wouldn’t want you falling off, yeah,” he said with a smile that was in equal parts charming and ominous.

They took off, and Tori immediately regretted dumping her thick-fabriced Oto uniform for a short-sleeved dress and leggings. The wind was cold, and she clutched her backpack to her chest as she shivered. Deidara and Sasori didn’t seem to notice, as they immediately started arguing over the true meaning of art, or something equally ridiculous.

This was bad. This was so heinously, hideously bad. She’d meant to use her fake ability to make a deal for her life, but she’d meant something short term, with just Sasori. She was not going to survive Akatsuki headquarters. This was a fact, plain and simple: she would tell them everything, because she wasn’t strong enough to withstand any of the many horrible things they could do, and then they would kill her. They couldn’t have some girl who knew all their secrets running around. If she was being optimistic, maybe they would keep her imprisoned until their organization inevitably crumbled.

And… and what if she ran into Hidan and Kakuzu again?

“Oh no,” Tori whispered to herself, and both her captors ignored her.

She had to escape, and she had to escape now, except how could she escape from a tiny aircraft hundreds of feet off the ground? How could she escape from two Akatsuki in general?

“Oh no, oh _fuck_ ,” Tori said.

“What does your _intent_ have to do with mindless destruction?” Sasori snapped at Deidara. They’d been talking about how Deidara’s art differed from regular explosions, which Sasori maintained it _didn’t._

“Of course intent matters,” Deidara said. Then he waved at Tori and continued, “Would it be art if she stuck some sticks to a corpse and made it dance around?”

Tori had a brief vision of a floppy, bloated corpse as a puppet on Sesame Street, which was unfortunately sort of funny. She had to work not to giggle.

“Of course not,” Sasori growled back. “Who in their right minds would judge that as art?”

“Children might,” Tori said without thinking. Sasori gave her an absolutely murderous look.

“ _Children might,_ ” Deidara repeated gleefully, and Tori instantly regretted inserting herself into their conversation. “Please, Oto girl, tell us more about how you think children would enjoy Danna’s art.”

“My name is Tori,” she supplied, and then Sasori cut her off with, “What does a lab experiment know about art?”

Tori decided she needed to immediately extract herself from this interaction, so she very cleverly said, “It’s not like science and art are completely discrete subjects. You think Deidara got clay to fly on sheer artistic merit?”

“The application of scientific principles to art does not necessitate an understanding of art to a scientist,” Sasori snapped back, and Tori really was going to stop engaging in this. _.._

“The scientific method requires creativity,” she said, like a _moron._

“Creativity doesn’t equal art through, yeah,” Deidara cut in.

“No, but both science and art are about applying creative methods to understand the world–”

“What kind of a definition of art is _that_ –”

Tori, unfortunately, had a long history of failing to disengage herself from things that interested her. Her throat still hurt from smoking, and she was hoarse in an impressively short amount of time spent arguing. The topic finally shifted to if art required a certain level of skill to be art, and Tori was able to shut her damn mouth.

At some point, the heavens opened up and it started to pour, cold rain smacking into them.

“God,” Deidara swore, “I fucking hate Rain Country, yeah.”

“We’re still over Grass,” Sasori pointed out.

“ _Ugh,”_ Deidara said, and that segued into an argument over stopping for the night.

Deidara managed to win that one with a reminder about a time when he’d crashed while flying at night through bad whether, and then they switched to if getting a hotel was worth it or not. Deidara said he was sick of sleeping outside, while Sasori pointed that, “You’ll be in your own bed tomorrow night. What’s the difference?”

“You’d understand if you actually slept, Danna,” Deidara sighed. Then he jabbed a thumb at Tori and said, “Are you gonna make a lady sleep outside, Danna?”

“How chivalrous,” Tori deadpanned.

“What difference does being a woman make?” Sasori asked, and Tori was glad to know that Sasori was equal opportunity when it came to making people miserable.

They landed outside a small town anyway, because it was Deidara’s bird and he did what he wanted. Neither of them bothered to get Tori down from the bird before it disappeared, and Tori landed in an undignified mess on the wet grass.

The rain had lessened to a light mist, but Tori was still shivering and miserable. Deidara looked less bothered, even as he rung water out of his hair. Either that cloak was impressively water resistant, or he was just used to being drenched and cold.

Tori eyed him enviously. Yes, she could see water droplets pooled on the cloak, not being absorbed into the material at all. She really should have thought of getting more weather resistant clothes.

Deidara gripped her roughly by the elbow and dragged her along behind him.

“This is coming out of your paycheck,” Sasori said as he followed.

“Shut up, Danna,” Deidara yelled over his shoulder. “You always make me pay, and then you set up a damn workshop and take up the whole room–”

The town was similar in design to the one Tori had previously been in, if not less well maintained. The cobblestone roads had cracked and missing stones, where muddy puddles had formed. Wooden structures with corrugated metal roofs were crammed in between old stone buildings, and the town felt more crowded– more people on the streets, busy and loud.

Tori was still shivering, her clothes and hair heavy and cold with water. The air was getting colder as the sun set.

“Hey, uh,” Tori said interrupting whatever dumb argument her captors were having now. “Would you mind if I got, um, a coat…?”

They both stared at her. Tori slouched her posture and exaggerated her shivering in an attempt to make herself as pathetic and sad looking as possible.

“Do you realize,” Deidara said after a beat, “that we’re KIDNAPPING you, yeah?”

He said this very loudly, and a pair of women passing paused and gave them a very funny look. Starting a scene would not help Tori get what she wanted, so she laughed and smacked Deidara’s bicep affectionately. The women seemed relieved and continued on their way.

“Then it would be a shame,” Tori send through her overly friendly smile, “if you did all that work and I got pneumonia and _died.”_

Deidara glanced down at his arm where she’d hit him, then back up at her with an incredibly scandalized looked.

“You–” he started, looking increasingly outraged with every passing second, and Tori worried she’d crossed some sort of line.

“She’s right,” Sasori said from behind her. “Deidara, if she gets sick, you have to deal with it.”

“Why do _I_ have to do _all of the work–”_ Deidara started, rounding on Sasori.

The argument actually turned into a scuffle, right in the middle of the street, which Sasori ended by grabbing Deidara’s entire face with Hiruko’s giant hand.

“I’m losing my patience,” Sasori said simply, then left them.

Deidara scowled and turned back to Tori. “I’m not buying anything for you, yeah,” he said, “and I’m not going to the trouble of stealing for you either, so–”

“It’s okay,” Tori said, “I’ve got money.”

“No,” Deidara said, “You don’t. I searched you.”

Tori fished a bill out of her bra. It was as wet as the rest of her, and another bill was stuck to it. Deidara’s mouth formed into a thin line.

“At the airport, when they search you,” Tori said helpfully, “they kind of go around your boobs with the sides of their hands–”

She held up her hands to demonstrate, and Deidara smacked them out of the air.

“Shut up,” he said. Then after a pause he added, “What the hell is an airport?”

Instead of answering, Tori turned on her heel and walked into the nearest store. It turned out to be entirely designer dresses, and they walked back out ten seconds later.

Deidara seemed to be bothered by the awkward silence as they wandered down the street, because he said, “Oto wasn’t actually paying you, were they?”

“No, I–” Tori frowned. Well, it wasn’t like Deidara was going to judge her for morally questionable behavior. “I sold drugs to rich teenagers.”

Deidara snorted with laughter. It was a good laugh, friendly and inviting, which was unfortunate because Deidara was an objectively evil person who was taking Tori to meet with more objectively evil people.

At the next store, Tori flipped over the price tag on the first coat she saw and asked, “Is this a fair price?”

Deidara looked down at it, then said as if he were telling a great joke, “Please tell me if _you_ think that’s a good price.”

Tori stared back down at the tag. There were a lot of zeros. All the prices here were in the hundreds and thousands. She didn’t know how to convert them to her own native currency, and she didn’t know if that would help even if she did.

“...I don’t know,” she said slowly. “We have different money where I’m from.”

Deidara’s eyes lit up like she’d said something especially outrageous, and Tori was left to conclude that different currencies were not common to the Elemental Nations. However, before Deidara could say anything, a salesperson inserted himself into their conversation.

“I assure you, miss,” he said, “we never overcharge for our top-quality–”

“So then this is way overpriced,” Tori concluded, dropping the tag.

The salesperson looked taken aback. That was perhaps a ruder thing than Tori might have said before she’d lived with a bunch of mean ninja underground, but she couldn’t say she cared.

The next store was of the variety that sold clothes out of unorganized bins, and the coats and jackets had significantly fewer zeros. She immediately pulled a bubblegum pink one off the rack.

“That is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen,” Deidara said.

“It has _fringes,”_ Tori said, delighted.

“It suits you,” Deidara replied. “You and your dumb face.”

She found a more practical coat– dark gray, hooded, mid-thigh, and proven waterproof by Deidara spitting on it in an amazing act of maturity. At check out, Deidara dropped a heather grey scarf on top. She smiled at him.

As soon as they were out of the store, Tori pulled on the coat and Deidara took the scarf right out of her hands and put it on himself. At the disappointed look on her face, he said, “What? Did you think this was for you?”

She rolled her eyes.

Deidara announced she was treating him to dinner since he’d just been _so_ accommodating, and he dragged her between different cheap take-away restaurants.

“Yaki _-tori,”_ Tori read off a menu, and beamed at Deidara. Deidara seemed to weigh how much he wanted this food versus the apparent joy it would bring Tori, and moved on to a place specializing in dumplings.

As she followed Deidara through the town, Tori realized that now would be the best time to escape. Getting away from just Deidara would be easier than getting away from Deidara _and_ Sasori. Despite the petty meanness, he was in a fairly good mood.

Currently, Deidara was arguing with a man because the hole-in-the-wall restaurant was out of bakudan for the evening. Tori didn’t even know what bakudan was. She wandered over to a stack of menus by the door and started flipping through one. Deidara did not seem to notice or care.

Could she just slip into a crowd? How did ninja track people? How had Deidara found her before?

She fantasized, briefly, about just walking out of the restaurant and away to freedom.

“Some people are just so rude,” Deidara grumbled from directly behind her, and she jumped. “This was the only place with bakudan, too.”

“What’s bakudan?” Tori asked, and Deidara cocked his head at her.

“I honestly can’t tell,” Deidara said, grabbing her arm, “if you’ve actually lived under a rock your whole life or you’re just stupid, yeah.”

Bakudan was some sort of deep fried egg, and also Deidara’s favorite food. After he’d whined about it being hard to find in Rain Country, Deidara settled for deep fried chicken instead, watching intently as the old woman serving them fried the meat right in front of them. He did not let go of Tori’s arm, and she wondered if he’d been more aware of her planning an escape than she’d thought.

“What about her?” the woman asked, jutting her chin at Tori.

“She’ll have the same,” Deidara said immediately. Tori was briefly offended that they were talking about her like she was not capable of ordering her own food, but then she realized she was probably lucky Deidara was feeding her at all.

While they were waiting for the woman to make a second entree, Deidara sniffed his own box and let an audible, pleased sigh. He looked down at Tori in a sort of indulgent, half-lidded way and said, “Yeah, you can treat me to breakfast too.”

“My pleasure,” Tori drawled back at him.

Deidara made her carry the food. He led her on zigzagging pattern, eventually stopping at a dilapidated looking building. It was a crumbling zombie of an older stone structure patched up and expanded with wood, and the sign overhead read COMFORT INN.

Tori barely held back a laugh at the name. She was almost disappointed it didn’t have the same logo has the Comfort Inn hotel franchise back in her world.  

“This is probably it,” Deidara said.

“How could you possibly know that?” Tori asked.

But sure enough, when Deidara asked if a “big, ugly guy” had checked in recently, the concierge nodded and said they were expected. He handed over a single key.

Deidara smirked at her pouting face all the to the end of the hall and into the room. Sasori barely glanced up when they entered.

“I knew,” Deidara said, dramatically, letting the door slam behind him, “because I’m a fucking ninja.”

Sasori had, much to Deidara’s predictions, spread a bunch of miscellaneous tools and body parts around the room. He’d shed Hiruko, too, examining the giant puppet’s arm with the blank expression of his actual body.

“Hope you don’t mind sleeping in a room with a bunch of dismembered people,” Deidara said cheerfully, and kicked a bundle of what looked like ribs out of the way to sit on the floor.

Sleeping in a room with the remains of several dismembered people was, quite unfortunately, not a new concept to Tori. Sasori’s spare parts, thankfully, did not smell quite as bad.

Tori sat gingerly, moving some type of serrated blade and a spool of wires out of the way. She wondered how Sasori preserved his puppets, then, if there was no chemical smell?

She wanted to ask him. It was the sort of weird fascination Orochimaru would indulge a person in, and then tease her about, and then leave her to hollow out a rotting corpse by herself. She didn’t know enough about Sasori yet to guess if he’d be flattered by her curiosity, or annoyed that she had the audacity to speak to him, or just annoyed at both her and Deidara in general for needing to eat and sleep.

From the other side of the room, Sasori didn’t look particularly strange, just young and indifferent in his expression. The longer she watched him pick at the contraption embedded in Hiruko’s forearm, though, the more it became apparent that there was definitely something vaguely inhuman about him. Something in the way he moved wasn’t quite right– there was no fidgeting, no hesitation in movement, no rise and fall of the chest to indicate breath.  

Deidara must have misinterpreted the look on her face, because he leaned over to jeer at her and say, “I know Danna has a pretty face, but have you noticed he doesn’t blink yet?”

“I’ll be sure to avoid staring contests with him,” Tori said, and reached for her own take out box.

It was silly to wonder about Sasori’s social skills, anyway. She needed to refocus on escape. Deidara said he wanted breakfast, so she might have another chance to isolate them from Sasori. Unless Sasori came with them? But then, maybe it was easier to distract them with each other. She was sure she could bait them into an argument with each other if she played her cards right.

Tori’s thoughts came to a complete stop once she opened the styrofoam take-out box and the smell of delicious, savory food hit her. The box was half filled with rice, layered with steamed vegetables and slices of fried chicken on top, and a dark sauce drizzled over it. Tori pushed aside the meat to pull out an actual, honest to god slice of carrot. Not mystery green mush. Not some sort of sad wilted leaf. A real, solid vegetable!

She nearly cried eating it.

“Fascinating, yeah,” Deidara said, sounding exactly as if watching Tori struggle not to cry over vegetables wasn’t fascinating at all.

“The food in Oto was shit,” Tori explained, and shoved a snap pea in her mouth. It was so good, and she didn’t even _like_ peas.

“Was Oto as weird and creepy as I think it was?” Deidara asked, staring at her hopefully.

“Hmm,” Tori said. “Yeah, probably.”

Deidara had probably not wanted to hear about how bad the food was in Oto, but that’s what was on Tori’s mind and what she told him about. He leaned over twice to steal strips of chicken from her food.

“...and then we must have chopped up the only cook who knew how to make rice, because at some point I swear we were eating rocks–”

“Wait,” Deidara interrupted, “‘Chopped up’ the cook?”

“Yeah,” Tori said. “Everyone in Oto was an experiment.”

Deidara looked downright eager. Tori told him about one of Keizo’s experiments on regeneration– enough to keep Deidara happy, and enough to make it sound like she could help Sasori figure out how to kill Orochimaru or whatever he wanted to do.

When she was done, she stood and look around the room. It was almost completely bare of furniture, with a couple of futons folded up neatly against a wall. There was a single, large window in one wall.

“There’s no bathroom,” Tori observed.

“Nope,” Deidara agreed, and then took the last piece of chicken from her box.

“...what if I have to go to the bathroom?” Tori asked.

Deidara shrugged. “Sucks for you, yeah.”

“I will pee on your bed,” Tori said flatly.

Deidara glowered at her, but Sasori cut in, “Deidara, just take her.”

“Danna,” Deidara yelled, head whipping around to glare at Sasori, “I am not a goddamn babysitter–”

They argued. Tori shifted in place a few times. Was there no bathroom because the bathrooms were communal? She’d never stayed in a place like that, but she knew they existed. A hotel couldn’t just _not_ have bathrooms, right?

“Ugh, you know what– you know what–” Deidara shoved a hand in the bags of clay at his side, and then half-heartedly threw two fat spiders at her.

Tori had enough sense in her to jump out of the way of the spiders’ trajectory, but then they crawled after her. She made several embarrassing squeaks trying to dance away from from them while not stepping on Sasori’s random equipment lying around.

“Based on your reaction,” Deidara said, watching Tori comically try to avoid the spiders, “I’m guessing you know what my art does, yeah.”

One of the spiders managed to get onto her foot. Tori stared down at it in horror.

“If you leave the hotel, that one is going to explode,” Deidara said. The other spider climbed onto her other foot. “And that one is going to come get me, so you better not run off, because I will be _pissed,_ yeah.”

Deidara then turned away from her and started rolling out a futon for himself. Tori wiggled her toes. The spiders stayed in place, sitting cutely on top of her feet.

“...then can I shower too?” she asked.

“Whatever,” Deidara answered. Sasori said nothing, continuing to blatantly ignore them in favor of picking at a puppet.

Tori grabbed her backpack and made it to the door before she turned back around and said, “You can’t listen in through the spiders, right? You won’t hear me pee?”

“Oh my god, _no,_ ” Deidara yelled and chucked a pillow at her.

Tori hurried out of the room and followed the signs for the communal baths.

That had been pretty good, she thought. Now she was alone, and all she had to do was figure out how to escape without having a clay spider blow off her leg or summon evil missing-nin to capture her.

  
_I’m going to die,_ she concluded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sasori: Orochimaru could have easily told you all of this. 
> 
> Tori: that seems wildly out of character
> 
> Sasori: .....oh no she's right


	7. the fuckening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tori uses her college education to do something which somehow turns out exactly as planned and not at all as planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHAPTER WARNING: Brief mention of suicide.

Once upon a time, what felt like a whole lifetime ago, Tori had been a dedicated college student taking courses like “Chemistry 102 with Lab” and “Freshman Writing Elective: Young Adult Fiction.” At the beginning of her fiction course, they’d read a few “original” fairy tales, and the one that had left the biggest impression on Tori was “The False Grandmother,” an older version of Little Red Riding Hood. 

In this version, the girl told the Wolf she had to go to the bathroom, and he let her out of the house to do her business. She ran. There was also some fairy tale-typical accidental cannibalism, but it was the clever trick that had stuck with Tori. Unfortunately, her captors were a little scarier than a wolf. 

Deidara’s clay spiders clung loyally to her feet as she walked through the hotel hallways. They were fat and cute and would kill her. 

It was actually a shame Deidara made his creations so cute before he destroyed them. Was that part of the art? She hoped she was never in the position to ask him. 

The baths were in a separate building, across a shabby courtyard of uncut grass. The hotel was truly on the edge of town– trees loomed above the bathhouse, signaling the start of the surrounding forest. 

Tori had expected shower stalls, but the bathing part was one big room: one side had an area with low stools and faucets to scrub off, and the other side had a large pool for soaking. Next to the door were several cubbies to leave your clothes, and a pile of thin towels. The entire room smelled vaguely of bleach. 

There were two other women in the bathroom. Tori turned her back and ignored them as best she could. She didn’t particularly mind nudity, but walking around naked in front of strangers wasn’t quite something she was comfortable with. She wrapped one of the towels around her and managed to fanagle getting her dress off under it. 

“Could you move, please,” she whispered to the spiders once she had her leggings around her ankles. The spiders did not react. She nearly tripped over herself pulling the leggings over them. 

From this she learned that the spiders were not going to come off her feet even if she tried to pry them off, but also they weren’t going to explode just from rough handling. 

Tori sat down on one of the stools, lathered soap into a hand towel, and considered what she knew about jutsu from her work in Oto. She didn’t think Deidara’s jutsu could possibly be smart enough to know what constituted the hotel and what didn’t; it probably relied on her being within a certain range of Deidara. She also didn’t think the spiders were smart enough to recognize her beyond– what, her chakra? Her scent? Surely she could trick them and get them to stick to something else. 

She massaged shampoo into her scalp, rinsed it off, and went to soak in the tub as far away as she could from the other two women, towel still wrapped firmly around her. 

The biggest constraint she had, then, was time. Maybe if she had weeks, she could use Orochimaru’s notes to come up with a seal to trick Deidara’s jutsu. Instead she probably had less than thirty minutes before Deidara and Sasori would start getting suspicious, and that was contingent on her assumptions about jutsu being true. The Akatsuki did, after all, have a long and storied history of whipping out reality-breaking jutsu at the last second. 

She could try cutting off the tops of her feet. She had the Oto medical kit with bandages and anesthetic; it would be fine. Except, as Deidara had pointed out, she had no weapons to cut anything with.

More importantly: Tori did not want to cut off her skin.   

She decided, instead, to try to transfer the spiders to her cloned heart. She’d brought her whole backpack with her, so it was sitting in a cubby with the rest of her things. If it was a true clone, and if she was right about Deidara’s jutsu, then it would be indistinguishable from her actual body to the spiders. 

She thought so, at least. It could also be possible that Deidara had just thought “feet” at the spiders and they’d done what he wanted, despite not having any sort of actual intelligence to know what a foot was. Ninja arts were bullshit enough that it seemed possible. 

Tori leaned back against the edge of the pool, letting her eyes close as she considered the best approach to this plan. Assuming she could get the spiders to move, she’d have to take the heart out of the jar. There were tiny threads of seal work painted right onto the organ, so it might be able to survive outside the jar, but for how long? Would the heart dying make the spiders explode? There were too many unknown variables. 

Her thoughts were abruptly interrupted by a scream from one of the women. 

“What? Keiko, what?” the other woman asked, standing in alarm. 

“SNAKE!” Keiko yelled, flailing in the water. “ _ SNAKE!” _

The other woman looked around frantically, then relaxed once she saw whatever Keiko was screaming about. “It’s just a grass snake, Keiko, calm down–”

Keiko did not calm down. Her friend grabbed her shoulders and said some vaguely soothing things, and Tori climbed out of the bath. 

“I can get it,” she called, walking to perimeter of the pool over to them. “Where is it?”   


Not-Keiko shot her a thankful look and pointed while Keiko yelled, “It will bite your head off!”

“It’s not venomous, is it?” Tori asked. 

“Not at all,” Not-Keiko assured her while Keiko screeched something about all snakes being poisonous monsters. 

A small green snake was partially wedged in a crack in the cement. Tori tiptoed toward the snake, bending her knees and crouching over it. When she could almost touch the snake with her fingertips, it darted out of the crevice. Tori lunged, which was not something you should do in a towel.

It didn’t matter. The women cheered even as her towel slipped. Tori yelped and grabbed the towel with one hand, the snake clasped triumphantly in the other.

“Thank the gods, thank the gods–” Keiko wept. 

Tori stared down at the tiny snake in her hand, twisting around and struggling. Tori liked snakes, and this one was a very pretty emerald green. 

“Honestly,” Not-Keiko chided her friend, “your husband is an elite shinobi, shouldn’t you be a little braver?”

“It was going to eat me alive, Akane,” Keiko wailed. 

“Oh my god, Keiko, you’re hopeless–”

The snake was very cute, but still Tori shifted her grasp on it so it couldn’t turn its head and bite her.

“It’s a  _ grass snake _ and you live in  _ Grass, _ Keiko.”

“Don’t make fun of me!”

“Excuse me,” Tori said, cutting them off. She had a new idea for escaping. She kept her eyes open, not letting herself blink so they would tear up. “Can you help me?”

She knew what she must look like at this point, her body exposed in the towel– Deidara had fucked up her face and then Sasori had fucked up her face again. While washing, she’d found bruises and cuts all over her body from Suigetsu dropping her and being lugged all over the forest floor and having ninja manhandle her. She wouldn’t be surprised if Sasori grabbing her neck hadn’t left a ring of bruises around it. 

The change on both women was instant. Akane’s posture went lax and her eyebrows scrunched together in sympathy. Keiko shifted seamlessly from hysterics to ramrod-straight posture, expression dead serious. 

“I, um,” Tori said, and then took in a long shuddering breath to make it look like she was fighting back tears. She still hadn’t blinked. “I came here with two men, but I didn’t want to… um... be with them...”

She stared down at her feet, biting her lip and making herself very small.

“We can help you sneak out the back,” Keiko said immediately. 

“I need more help than that,” Tori said, nodding down at her feet. 

Akane recoiled. “What  _ is _ that?”

“It’s a ninja technique,” Keiko said, taking two steps forward. Then she noticed the snake still in Tori’s hand and took a step back. 

“You said you’re from Kusa, right?” Tori said, finally feeling the waterworks coming. She amped up the ham and croaked out, “You can get them to come help me, right?”

“I can…” Keiko started to say, suddenly looking uncomfortable. “Kusa doesn’t just go around saving random girls. Maybe if you have some form of payment–”

Tori wiped tears away from her eyes and let out a tiny, pathetic sob. 

“Surely we can cover the cost…?” Akane said, wringing her hands. “Keiko, she caught the snake for you.”

“Hiring a team to fight other ninja will be  _ really _ expensive,” Keiko replied, and then in a whisper Tori could barely hear over her own sobs, continued, “They’re probably Kusa-nin on their week off, anyway, they do thing like this all the time and the village doesn’t stop–”

Tori thought that, if she could convince Kusa she was clairvoyant, or that she could do secret Orochimaru-inspired genetic manipulations, she might be able to convince them to come extract her. But she remembered the scars all up and down Karin’s arms. It would only be trading one captor for another. 

“You don’t understand,” Tori said, letting her voice slip from controlled sob into outright bawling. “One of them is Sasori of the Red Sand.”

Both women froze. Tori didn’t know how well-known Deidara or Akatsuki overall were at this point, but Sasori definitely had a reputation. Keiko had to take two long, calming breaths before she said, 

“That might be something the village will care about.”

Tori thanked them and went to let the grass snake loose outside in the courtyard. When she came back in to change and gather her stuff, she heard the women talking again. 

“We can’t just let her go back,” Akane was saying, sounding panicked. “Sasori is– he’s–”

“He’s her problem, and we can’t do anything for her,” Keiko said bluntly. “We’re going to leave, immediately, and I’ll send a message ahead so we can get an escort–”

Keiko shut up as soon as she saw Tori, who casually waved at them as she pulled out her clothes. It sounded like Keiko wasn’t actually going to do anything on her behalf, but that was fine. All Tori wanted was for Kusa to be alerted to Sasori’s presence in their country. 

_ Nailed it, _ Tori thought. 

 

\--

 

Tori had to knock to be let into the room, which felt very odd as kidnappers generally didn’t impose barriers to their victims staying in their prisons. There were a couple of yells on the other side, and then Deidara opened the door. He very rudely grabbed her by the arms and pulled her in before slamming the door behind her. Sasori did not even look up, elbow-deep in the thorax of a puppet. 

“Have you been  _ crying?” _ Deidara asked, as if crying while being kidnapped by evil ninja was a ridiculous thing to do. His hair was down and recently brushed, looking tame next to the pinched and mildly disgusted look on his face. 

“I guarantee you this situation is more stressful for me than it is for you,” Tori snapped back, sounding exactly like she’d recently been crying. 

Deidara had rolled out his futon, his cloak spread over the blanket in a way that was almost cute. Tori bent and picked up a second futon, intent on finding the spot in the room that maximized her distance from both Deidara and Sasori.

“Deidara,” Sasori called. 

“Oh, right,” Deidara said, suddenly in Tori’s personal space. “Don’t want to waste clay, yeah.”

Her first instinct was to back away, but then she thought,  _ no, fuck this guy, _ and straightened her posture to scowl at him the best she could. Deidara ignored her, though, and tapped each of his clay spiders with his toes. They each burst in turn into even smaller spiders which scattering across the room, crawling in random patterns until they came to rest in neat lines across the bottom of the door and window sill. 

“Disgusting,” Sasori quipped. 

“Shut up,” Deidara yelled back. “You could set up something to secure the entrances, but you won’t, because I do all the work around here–”

Tori set up her futon while they snarked at each other. Deidara ended the argument by crawling under his own covers, announcing that Sasori didn’t know what he was missing, and… just going to sleep. Tori blinked at him, her own bed half-made at her feet. 

“...we’re going to leave the lights on?” she asked. 

“How else am I supposed to work?” Sasori replied, not even bothering to look at her. 

Tori considered telling Sasori that maybe he should just switch out his human eyes for an animal’s eyes more suited to work in the dark, then, like some sort of morbid Mr. Potato Head. She didn’t think he’d appreciate her design input, though, so she said nothing as she flopped down on the futon. Deidara had left his shoes on, so she did as well. 

The futon was just as lumpy as the one she’d had in Oto, but the blanket was softer and nicer. She was tempted to take off her shoes off to embrace it fully, but presumably Deidara’s shoes were still on in case he had to leap up from sleep and run somewhere. Tori had similar hopes about where her night was going. 

She made a show of getting comfortable, shifting and rearranging her pillow and pulling the blanket over her face to block the light. Instead of sleep, she stared at the inside of the fabric and listened to the arhythmic sound of Sasori’s ministrations over his art. 

Tori hadn’t had a lot of free time in Oto, but the vast majority of what she got had been spent in isolation in her cell. It had been agonizingly boring at first; in Tori’s old life, she could unlock her phone and access the internet the second she felt bored, after all. She’d napped a lot, paced her cell and gave herself anxiety imaging up new horrors Kabuto and Orochimaru could throw at her, and then finally she adjusted. Now, she was perfectly fine lying in one position for hours on end with nothing to entertain her but her own mind. 

“I can’t sleep if you’re awake, yeah,” Deidara said accusingly.

Tori frowned at the inside of her blanket cocoon. How could he sleep through Sasori being the most annoying roommate ever, but her lying perfectly still and quiet was distracting? 

“I am upset and stressed,” she answered.

“So?” Deidara asked, and Tori wanted to scream. 

Instead, she rolled over and flipped the pillow over her head, like she was blocking out all noise Sasori was making. Maybe Deidara could tell she was on-edge and that was keeping him up. She sniffled and hiccupped a few times, like she was poorly hiding her tears from them. That’s what they expected, wasn’t it? That’s what  _ everyone _ expected of her. 

Deidara muttered something that was probably insulting, and then nothing was said for hours and hours. 

Tori willed herself into relaxing by trying to recall the entire and convoluted plot of Game of Thrones. After a few hours of entertaining herself, she remembered she’d never know how the series ended, made herself sad, and transitioned into her favorite hobby of over-thinking everything.

What if Kusa didn’t intervene and let Sasori go? What if they just decided to run reconnaissance and not confront him? What if the three of them crossed the border into Rain before Kusa got the message?

She still liked this plan better than messing with the spiders, she decided. The variables in this one were less likely to literally blow up in her face. 

At that moment, as if to prove her wrong, the window exploded. Deidara was on his feet with his poaches of clay strapped around his waist before Tori even registered what was happening. Cold hands gripped her, yanking her up from her bed.

Her blankets were on fire. Huh. She watched them fall from her as the thing pulled her up. 

The thing holding her was a puppet. Its jaw clicked in her ear, and it retreated to where Deidara and Sasori– who’d left Hiruko abandoned in the corner– were standing back to back in the middle of the room. 

“Three in the hall and two on the roof–” Deidara announced, glaring at the door. His spiders paraded across the sill. “Can I just blow up the building?”

“Six in the yard,” Sasori reported back, facing down the hole in the wall where Deidara’s spider had decimated the window. “ANBU masks confirmed. And no, you can’t just  _ blow up _ a building–” 

Whoever was on the other side of the door seemed to disagree– or at least decide that triggering a trap was better than waiting for the Akatuski to make their move, because then the door exploded as well. Deidara cackled with glee even as a clay bird appeared to take the brunt of the force. 

Tori found herself dropped onto her backside between the two of them, as Sasori moved the puppet that was holding her with a flick of his finger. The thing jittered and went flying at a shinobi that, as far as Tori could tell, had just appeared from the shadows in the corner like a goddamn ghost. 

Or– to be fair– like a  _ goddamn ninja.  _

The shinobi was dressed in all black with a blazing white mask. Tori watched the puppet slash at the ninja from between her fingers, like a kid watching a horror film. The shinobi staggered back from the puppet, then did a series of hand seals that made the floor swallow up the puppet and smash it to bits. The shinobi took two steps toward her and collapsed. 

Poison? Injuries she hadn’t noticed? 

She had no idea. Next to the body, her blankets were smoldering. Her bag was knocked on its side, relatively undamaged and flame-free. 

There was a hole in the ceiling now, and Sasori was yelling at Deidara as he leapt through it, and there was metal clanking alarming close to Tori’s ear, and it occurred to her that she had given Kusa the location of a notorious missing-nin to take out with absolutely no reason to ensure she lived as well. 

Sasori, theoretically, wanted to keep her alive to deliver her to Pein, which was presumably why she hadn’t been impaled by a stray kunai yet. That was the catch-22 of this world, wasn’t it? If you were important enough to keep alive, you were important enough to kidnap and use. 

“Brat, blowing up a hotel isn’t  _ art,” _ Sasori was yelling up at the hole in the ceiling, even as puppets shot fire and senbon at people. “I need spare parts left over–  _ DEIDARA–” _

On one hand, Sasori was moving further away from where she was squatting in the middle of the hotel room with her arms over her head. If she followed him, he’d probably intervene in her dying in the crossfire.

On the other hand, the Kusa-nin didn’t specifically want her dead, and based on the general roar of screaming form the building, the other civilians bystanders were mostly still alive and kicking. 

Tori took a deep breath. She shot forward, going directly from her squat into a clumsy dive for her backpack. Scooping it up, she hopped the smouldering remains of the door and ran like hell down the hall. 

People were wandering around, confused and terrified. Tori ignored them, dodging around bodies and clutching her backpack to her chest and following the signs for the back exit. She burst out of the hotel, and then–

“HEY!” Deidara yelled, landing directly in front of her. “What did you  _ do?” _

Tori actually screamed then, in some mix of shock and anger and fear.

Another puppet appeared, wrapping two sets of arms around her in a bear hug from behind, forcing her to drop her backpack.

“Why are there so many?” Sasori asked, appearing at Tori’s shoulder. “This isn’t a normal team.”

Sasori had crawled back into Hiruko at some point while she’d been distracted, and even with half the face covered, he gave off the impression of being livid. 

Tori kicked at the puppet holding her a bit, to no avail. Sasori didn’t even look back at her as he batted projectiles out of the air. 

“Annoying,” Sasori said, then slowly started wading across the hotel’s yard to the treeline the projectiles were coming form. 

Deidara sort of glanced at Tori and said vaguely, “Eh, you’ll be fine, yeah,” and jogged after Sasori to leave her standing around, restrained by a puppet and undefended.

“HEY!” Tori yelled after him. “Hey, come back here!”

She fumed and kicked some more at the puppet as she watched Hiruko start pulling men out of the trees like apples. Deidara whooped and summoned another bird; a Kusa-nin using some sort of air jutsu propelled himself into the sky after him. 

Tori actually felt sort of bad for the Kusa-nin. It was really obvious Kusa was putting a lot of effort into this– they’d sent this many shinobi, after all– and it wasn’t doing them much good. Deidara and Sasori had both taken damage, sure, but it was almost sad how many men in ANBU masks they’d mowed down. 

Then, Deidara yelled, “Oh, fuck, _ Danna–” _

Later, Tori would learn what happened was this: in a last-ditch effort, two of the remaining Kusa-nin had compressed all their chakra and then released it all at once, in what was colloquially known as a “suicide jutsu.”

What she experienced in the moment was a shockwave that flung her off her feet into the building wall behind her. The puppet shattered, the wall crumbled, and Tori’s back exploded into so much pain she blacked out for a moment. 

When she came to, she probably would have assumed Deidara had just done something massively stupid, had her brain been up to thinking enough to make assumptions. Sasori was out of Hiruko again, screaming insults at Deidara while they… fought some other dudes. Or each other? Unclear. 

Tori moved gingerly. Something was very wrong with her back. Or shoulder? Also unclear. 

Moving seemed like a bad idea. Not moving seemed like a worse idea. She rolled over onto her knees and fumbled around; her backpack had painkillers. Anesthetics. What was the difference? Didn’t matter– they’d let her run. 

It took her a few moments to find it in the rubble. The glass jar of her heart had finally broken, leaving weird heart-goo all over her things. 

She’d have to mourn its loss later. She shoved the bits of glass and the heart itself aside, pulling out the now-cracked plastic case of pre-filled syringes. Only two of the syringes inside survived, which was fine. Tori flipped the plastic cap off the needle and stabbed it into her shoulder, right through her sleeve. 

She chucked the needle aside and stood, pulling her bag onto her good shoulder. She could only see three Kusa-nin left, but Deidara and Sasori were slower than before. She turned and ran. 

Tori refused to be grateful for anything Kabuto had put her through, but before his experiments she wouldn’t have been able to run very far, even with the help of adrenaline, and she definitely wouldn’t have been able to run at all with a fucked up arm. He’d taught her to keep moving even when she just wanted to lie down and cry. 

She knew she couldn’t get very far. She was no ninja, and she’d have to stop soon or collapse. She needed to figure out how to hide.

She skirted the edge of the village, ignoring the occasional civilian yelling about fire and running towards the hotel, and then heading into the forest. She found a creek and walked upstream in ankle-deep freezing water. It was the type of thing someone in a movie would do, but she didn’t know if it would help keep shinobi off her trail. She pretended it would.

Eventually the stream fed into a river, and she walked along the shallow parts until it became too muddy to continue.

She was too tired to run anymore. Hours had passed and the sun had come up and she didn’t know how far she’d come. Her shoulder was starting to throb again.

She found a particularly thick patch of bamboo and managed to wedge herself into it, just like the little snake she’d found in a crevice in the bathhouse. 

She fell asleep, and then woke to rain. 

Her shoulder hurt so much she almost couldn’t stand it. Her skin was oddly tender in several places– apparently she hadn’t escaped burns from the explosions. She found rips in her clothes she didn’t remember. Her feet ached.

She pulled up her hood and made herself walk.

She trudged along the river bank in a daze, indulging in vivid fantasies of laying down in the soft grass and napping for seven years. Imaging all the running from missing-nin she could do well-rested!

There was a town on the other side of the river. That was nice.

She came to a bridge. She slowly walked across it, absent-mindedly fantasizing about the hospital bed she could maybe find and then take a nap in.

At the end of a bridge was a small building and a gate. A toll?

She approached the building.

It was a border checkpoint into the Land of Rain.

All good things must come to an end, she supposed.

 

\--

 

The man inside had asked her a bunch of questions which she may or may not have answered, she couldn’t remember. He let her sit down and gave her a juice box.

The man was writing a note. He rolled it up and gave it to a falcon. He looked at her and sighed. He went away and came back with a box of cookies and a paper plate.

“You’re calling them in, then?” she asked, swinging her feet from the chair.

“What?” The man said. He poured the cookies on the plate and set them down on the chair next to her.

“You know, my escort.” Tori took a cookie. Why was he being so nice?

“Your escort?” The man seemed sincerely puzzled, scratching his temple under this Ame headband.

Tori bit into a cookie. “Oh my god,” she said. “You don’t know who I am.”

The man blinked at her. “Er… should I? No one mentioned anything about–”

No wonder he was being so nice. This man was only seeing a small, injured girl who’d wandered across the bridge in a confused haze. He was taking pity on her and, unfortunately for him, that was something Tori could use.

Tori sighed dramatically and dropped the half-eaten cookie back onto the plate.

“You mean word hasn’t reached yet?” she asked, trying to make her accent sound as over-the-top entitled as she could. 

“Word?” the man was shifting nervously. “My supervisor said–”

“My father,” Tori drawled, “the inventor of cup noodles, is on a very important business trip in the Land of Wind, and I am to join him post haste.”

Apparently her interpretation of entitlement was Gretchen Wieners-meets-Draco Malfoy. Well. It’s not like anyone here knew who any of those characters were for comparison.

The man was starting to look concerned. “The inventor of cup noodles?”

“ _ Yes _ , pay attention,” she sighed, exasperated. “I am a very important person.” She gave a flourish of her hand and flipped her hair, which was disgustingly frizzy from the rain.

“But… why are you…”

“I was attacked,  _ obviously _ ,” she screamed with such over-the-top-energy she pushed herself to her feet. Her shoulder throbbed. She gripped it dramatically. “My party was ambushed by a team of vagabonds and my shinobi escorts were all murdered.”

She rolled her eyes, as if the entire concept of death was ridiculous.

“Honestly, Kusa chuunin are simply not up to standards anymore. Now, Kumo ninja, those are some fine…”

She started babbling. And pacing. And gesturing with her good hand. She was losing control of this situation.

The man was becoming visibly upset.

“But that’s horrible! You poor girl, how did you survive?”

She stuck her nose up vainly. “You think simple thugs could kill the daughter of the inventor of cup noodles?”

“No! Obviously not!”

“Obviously. Now,” she sniffed, “ _ where _ is my escort?”

The man suddenly looked very sad. “I’m sorry, Miss Cup Noodle, but Rain has closed borders. You need resident papers or special written permission from the Amegakure leader to enter. I’ll write my supervisor–”

Tori rolled her not just her eyes, but her entire head. “ _ Ob-vi-ous-ly _ ,” she stressed, “I have written permission. My father, the inventor of cup noodles, arranged it so I could peacefully pass through your silly little country months ago.”

“Then– the papers–”

“I think I just said that I was ROBBED?” she interrupted shrilly. “They took  _ e-ver-y- _ thing, obviously.”

“Ah, of course, obviously,” the man said, nodding profusely. “I completely understand. I’ll send another note to my supervisor and then–”

“Ugh, don’t bother,” she said, rolling her eyes again and picking up her bag. “I don’t have the time or patience for this. I’ll go into town and hire my own escort.”

“But–”

She headed for the door.

“You can’t–”

She flung the door open.

“Miss Cup Noodle, please!”

She let the door bang shut behind her. The man made no attempt to stop or follow her, instead diving back toward the note he’d been writing earlier.

His supervisor would not be pleased. 

She found a clinic in town, and as soon as she walked in an exasperated nurse was pushing forms into her hands and asking her questions about her injuries.

She wrote her name down as Noodle Cup (age 17, from the Land of Lightning) and easily lied her way through how she’d dislocated her shoulder.

The clinic had no overnight services, so after resetting her shoulder, putting her arm in a sling, and bandaging the worst of her burns, the nurse shoved a few pieces of medicine into her arms and sent her back onto the street.

The rush Tori had gotten from lying to the border guard had faded and she was so tired she sat down right on the curb outside the clinic. She wearily transferred her new medical supplies (a box of painkillers, some ointment for the burns, gauze and medical tape) into her backpack and simply stared into space for a while.

Eventually the clinic closed and the nurse came out and scolded her. Tori trudged down the street, found a park with a single tree, and laid down in the dewy grass under it.

Some time later, in a half-asleep daze, she heard a familiar voice say, “Is this for real?”

She blearily opened her eyes. Something blue was in her face. She blinked her eyes a few times to clear them.

Hoshigaki Kisame was leaning over her.

“Aw man,” she said, rolling over onto her side, away from him. Maybe if she went back to sleep he’d go away.

Something foot-like poked her back.

“I take it you recognize us, Tori-san?” Kisame asked, sounding amused as always.

_ Us? _ “Is fucking  _ Itachi _ with you?”

Kisame laughed, and then his strong hand was wrapped around her good arm, pulling her up to her feet.

“Yes, fucking Itachi is here,” Kisame said good naturedly.

Itachi stared down at her, looking completely apathetic.  

“Please kill me quickly,” she said to Kisame. He raised his eyebrows slightly.

“Ah, no, Tori-san,” Kisame said. “We’re not here to kill you. Leader-sama wants to meet you first.” Kisame paused, and then his grin took on a sort of mean quality. “Then he’ll probably decide to kill you.”

Tori felt her legs go out. Kisame and Itachi, being super fast ninja with lightning-like reflexes, could have easily caught her. They didn’t. 

“You’re not going to make me walk, are you?” she said, staring into the sky. “Because I’d rather you just drag me along behind you while I enjoy my last few moments in peace.”

Neither Kisame nor Itachi said anything, but then a hand wrapped around her ankle and started dragging her across the grass. 

_ “Hey,” _ Tori yelped, craning her neck to see what was going on. Kisame’s blue hand was pulling her along behind him. Out of the corner of her eye, Itachi bent and picked up her bag. “Hey!” she repeated and kicked Kisame’s forearm. 

Mistake. The shift in her weight dug her bad shoulder into the ground, and she saw black spots. An embarrassing sound of pain escaped her throat. 

“Kisame,” Itachi murmured. His feet were her next to her face, and her bag dangled form his hand.

“It was her idea,” Kisame replied, and stubbornly kept dragging her along. 

Tori relaxed her neck. Being hauled along did, technically, hurt a bit, especially as her dress rolled up and her bare skin dragged along the ground. But the ground was mostly mud, so it was sort of like the world’s most unfun slip-n-slide. 

“This is very immature,” Itachi said after a while, and it was unclear if he was addressing Kisame or Tori. 

Tori crossed her arms over her chest, glaring up at the overcast sky above. She was so  _ done _ with ninja, and she didn’t care if it was over dramatic or immature to refuse to walk. She didn’t care if she messed up her shoulder again, or if she cut up her back on rock and underbrush. If it inconvenienced ninja even the slightest, then good.  _ Good! _

They left the town, and the muddy road was dark as it crept through lush trees. At her level Tori could see all sorts of mosses and ferns, dense between the trees. The sky above was a solid, angry grey, and she heard the rumble of thunder twice before it actually started raining. 

The rain, hitting her mouth and eyes relentlessly, did tempt her to agree to walk like a normal human. But the hood of her coat was definitely filled with mud by now, so instead she flung her arm over her face dramatically. 

She gave up when the road turned from mud to cobblestone. 

“Hey,” she croaked, tapping Kisame’s wrist with her free foot. “Hey, my beauty sleep is over now. I can walk.”

“It’s what you wanted,” Kisame called back at her and made no move to let her go. “It’s not my fault you didn’t think this through.”

Tori almost asked,  _ Why are you being so mean? _ As if accusing Kisame of being  _ mean _ would convince him to stop. 

The one good thing about being dragged through mud was that she was now so thoroughly covered it formed a thin layer between her and the cobblestones. A layer that was being slowly shaved away, and her bare skin was next in line to be shaved.

“You’re being awfully  _ rude,” _ Tori decided on, and that got Kisame to turn his head at look at her. “Worst kidnapping ever. Three out of ten.”

Kisame raised his eyebrows. “What did we get points for?”

“Well,” Tori said, blinking water out of her eyes to meet his gaze. “Itachi was nice enough to carry my bag.”

Kisame stopped walking. In her peripheral vision, Tori could see Itachi pause as well. “How did you rank the artist duo?”

Tori had absolutely no idea what Kisame’s relationship with Deidara and Sasori was like, so she couldn’t guess an answer that he’d want to hear. She did know he hated liars, though, so she went with the truth. 

“Eight out of ten,” she said. “They gave me food.”

Kisame burst into laughter and dropped her leg. Tori rolled, stood, and staggered several paces to the left as blood rushed to her head. Her limbs were stiff and felt light as she stretched. 

Now that she was upright, she could see the walls of Amegakure in the distance. Tall buildings with neon lights poked out from behind it, all silhouetted by dark clouds. 

“If you’re done,” Itachi said, sounding entirely unimpressed with both of them. In person he gave off the air of someone who was too tired for feelings, and he probably would not have been intimidating at all if something if the back of Tori’s mind wasn’t going,  _ Holy crap, it’s fucking Uchiha Itachi.  _

Kisame clapped her on the back, nearly knocking her over again and making pain shoot through her shoulder, and said, “Let’s go, Tori-san.”

Kisame, in contrast, was intimidating even without prior knowledge of his criminal record. He was big, and broad, and he had a giant sword on his back. Plus he was a light shade of blue, which was… not even that weird in the grand scheme of genetic anomalies in this world, now that she thought about it. 

They waltzed right into Ame, then through the town center, and not one person gave them a second glance. Ame had a lot of covered walkways between buildings, and the roads were lined with deep gutters that rushed with water. 

“Does it always rain this hard?” Tori asked. 

“Hmm,” Kisame answered, which was the sort of answer she’d gotten in Oto when she asked for information above her clearance. She knew the rain had to do with a jutsu, but how could  _ amount of rainfall _ be too sensitive to tell her? 

While the center of Ame was teaming with people, the outskirts had plenty of what were clearly abandoned buildings. There were no people on the streets, which were left quiet and dark. The shops that lined the streets weren’t just closed, but nonexistent, with window after window opening into empty rooms filled with dust. There was a story here, and probably a sad one, and Tori didn’t have much headspace to ponder it because she was still hung up on the stupid rain. 

The building they led her into was a lone beacon of light in the dark neighborhood. The first floor was very clearly a lobby– unmanned desk with potted fake plants and all– and Tori’s mind completely short circuited. She didn’t know what she had expected from the Akatsuki hideout, but it wasn’t a _ lobby. _ The front desk had a shiny marble top and the opposite wall was lined with mirrors and there was a  _ floor directory _ posted next to the stairs and a  _ chandelier.  _ It was a modern one– a nest of brass arms ending in light bulbs– and half the bulbs were out, but it was still a  _ chandelier.  _

“You didn’t look up very much,” Kisame said, sounding disappointed. 

“What?” Tori asked, trying to mesh “secret rainfall statistics” with “chandelier.” 

“Ame has the three tallest buildings on the continent,” Itachi said dully. “Usually visitors find them quite impressive.”

Tori stared at him. Why the hell was it okay to tell her records for building heights but not weather patterns? Ame’s buildings weren’t even that impressive; she’d seen Manhattan. Even her mid-sized hometown had a more impressive downtown. 

“Where are you from?” Itachi asked, and Tori supposed his actual question was, “What’s your background that made you not even notice the skyscrapers, which are a rarity in this universe?”

“Uh…” Tori started, and abruptly realized she did not know the name of a single town that wasn’t a hidden village. “Hot Water Country?” she tried. 

“You don’t sound so sure about that,” Kisame said, his polite-but-mean grin back on his face.

“I am definitely from Hot Water Country,” Tori said as convincingly as possible. 

Itachi didn’t even really do facial expressions, but even he managed to look incredulous. 

Luckily, Tori was saving from continuing her incredibly awkward lie by someone bounding down the stairs into the the lobby. Unluckily, that person was Hidan. 

“Yo,” he greeted, casually twirling his scythe in a way that definitely endangered the fake potted plants. “Why the  _ fuck _ did we get called back in?”

Tori dove behind Itachi. 

“We’re to discuss what to do with Sasori and Deidara’s discovery,” Itachi answered blandly.

“Yeah, and what’s that?” Hidan asked.  “This girl?”

He took a step to side to get a look at Tori. Tori took a step to the side to keep Itachi between them. Hidan looked at spot behind both her and Itachi, and Tori glanced over to find he was staring at her reflection in a mirror. 

Their reflections made eye-contact. Hidan’s eyebrows furrowed. His lips parted slightly. Tori could almost see the gears working in his head. She watched the exact moment he face turned to inhuman rage.

“CHOCOLATE SYRUP!” Hidan screamed and lunged at her, scythe swinging. Kisame hitched Samehada off his shoulder and blocked the scythe.

“HOW FUCKING DARE YOU,” Hidan was screaming at Tori as she cowered behind Itachi. “YOU FUCKING HEATHEN, YOU BLASPHEMOUS BITCH!”

Itachi didn’t even blink.

“You’ve met before?” Kisame asked pleasantly. Hidan answered with a string of obscenities that didn’t even make sense.

“What are you DOING?” Kakuzu hollered from the stairs. “Can’t you be quiet for one–”

“The bitch came back,” Hidan yelled, pressing down harder with his scythe. “Kisame, you’re blocking my  _ divine duty _ to eviscerate her–”

“Oh, her,” Kakuzu said, appearing behind Hidan. He stared at Tori, dark and menacing and surprisingly tense, and briefly she was terrified he was about to attack her too. Then Kakuzu’s weird eyes over to Itachi, who was standing there calmly and scratching his forearm. 

Kakuzu sighed deeply and wrestled Hidan into a headlock. 

“You pile of FUCK,” Hidan bellowed and aimed a kick at Kisame, and it was unclear who he was yelling at. 

“Shall we?” Itachi said dully, inclining his head at Tori. 

He headed for the stairs, still holding her bag in one hand. Tori did not want to go wherever he was taking her– be it to a dungeon or to Pein or to a literal guillotine– but Itachi seemed like a safer bet than whatever fistfight was happening in front of her. 

She scuttled after him, not even giving Hidan a second glance. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tori: why do you have a _lobby_
> 
> Itachi: lots of buildings have lobbies
> 
> Tori: ???
> 
> (If you're curious about the fairy tale Tori refers to at the beginning of the story, you can read a short version of it [here.](http://rossobella.blogspot.com/2007/09/finta-nonna.html))

**Author's Note:**

> Questions, comments, complaints? Leave a comment. :)


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